hans is liveliest when it is most
argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the
Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His
style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for
intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the
impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is
being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more
insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far
more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs
Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious
excess when he says of Brome:

Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in
their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as
Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.

Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going many
miles too far when he calls _The Antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful and
delightful farces in the world." It is a piece of poetic low comedy that
will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it
expecting to be bored.

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average
reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed
in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale.
Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry
rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be
said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their
period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming
landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble
circumstances.

They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few
of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another
up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are
individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by
Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious
possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets
by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest
of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and
Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never
existed. Shakespeare alone was