ular
than the average workmanship of that time:--

She works religious petticoats; for flowers
She'll make church-histories. Her needle doth
So sanctify my cushionets; besides
My smock-sleeves have such holy embroideries,
And are so learned, that I fear in time
All my apparel will be quoted by
Some pure instructor. Yesterday I went
_To see a lady that has a parrot: my woman_
_While I was in discourse converted the fowl_;
And now it can speak nought but Knox's works;
So there's a parrot lost.

Blank verse that has learned to tolerate such lines as the two here set
in italics can only end by becoming prose. And, indeed, that was the
destined development of the drama, even had the theatres never been
closed under the Commonwealth. The history of blank verse reflects with
curious exactness the phases of the history of the drama. When the metre
was first set on the stage, in the Senecan drama, it was stiff and
slow-moving; each line was monotonously accented, and divided from the
next by so heavy a stress that the absence of rhyme seemed a wilful
injury done to the ear. Such as it was, it suited the solemn moral
platitudes that it was called upon to utter. Peele, Marlowe, and
Shakespeare made the drama lyrical in theme and treatment; the measure,
adapting itself to the change, became lyrical in their hands. As the
drama grew in scope and power, addressing itself to a greater diversity
of matter, and coming to closer grips with the realities of life, the
lyrical strain was lost, and blank verse was stretched and loosened and
made elastic. During the twenty years of Shakespeare's dramatic activity,
from being lyrical it tended more and more to become conversational in
Comedy, and in Tragedy to depend for its effects rather on the rhetorical
rise and fall of the period than on the unit of the line. From the drama
of Charles the First's time, when inferior workmen had carried these
licenses to the verge of confusion, it is a perfectly natural transition
to the heroic couplet for Tragedy and the well-bred prose of Etherege for
Comedy. Blank verse had lost its character; it had to be made vertebrate
to support the modish extravagances of the heroic plays; and this was
done by the addition of rhyme. Comedy, on the other hand, was tending
already, long before the civil troubles, to social satire and the
life-like representation of contemporary character and manners, so that
prose was its only effective ins