cs, which probably can never
return again; for after two or three, the rest can be but repetitions
with a few variations.

In Italy, from 1530 to 1580, a vast multitude of books were written on
Love; the fashion of writing on that subject (for certainly it was not
always a passion with the indefatigable writer) was an epidemical
distemper. They wrote like pedants, and pagans; those who could not
write their love in verse, diffused themselves in prose. When the
Poliphilus of Colonna appeared, which is given in the form of a dream,
this dream made a great many dreamers, as it happens in company (says
the sarcastic Zeno) when one yawner makes many yawn. When Bishop Hall
first published his satires, he called them "Toothless Satires," but his
latter ones he distinguished as "Biting Satires;" many good-natured men,
who could only write good-natured verse, crowded in his footsteps, and
the abundance of their labours only showed that even the "toothless"
satires of Hall could bite more sharply than those of servile imitators.
After Spenser's "Faerie Queen" was published, the press overflowed with
many mistaken imitations, in which fairies were the chief actors--this
circumstance is humorously animadverted on by Marston, in his satires,
as quoted by Warton: every scribe now falls asleep, and in his

----dreams, straight tenne pound to one
Outsteps some _fairy_----
Awakes, straiet rubs his eyes, and PRINTS HIS TALE.

The great personage who gave a fashion to this class of literature was
the courtly and romantic Elizabeth herself; her obsequious wits and
courtiers would not fail to feed and flatter her taste. Whether they all
felt the beauties, or languished over the tediousness of "The Faerie
Queen," and the "Arcadia" of Sidney, at least her majesty gave a vogue
to such sentimental and refined romance. The classical Elizabeth
introduced another literary fashion; having translated the Hercules
Oetacus, she made it fashionable to translate Greek tragedies. There was
a time, in the age of fanaticism, and the Long Parliament, that books
were considered the more valuable for their length. The seventeenth
century was the age of folios. Caryl wrote a "Commentary on Job" in two
volumes folio, of above one thousand two hundred sheets! as it was
intended to inculcate the virtue of patience, these volumes gave at once
the theory and the practice. One is astonished at the multitude of the
divines of this age; whose works now