ord and Massinger still lingered on,
there were no successors for them but Shirley and Davenant. The
philosophic and meditative taste of the age had produced indeed poetic
schools of its own: poetic satire had become fashionable in Hall, better
known afterwards as a bishop, and had been carried on vigorously by
George Wither; the so-called "metaphysical" poetry, the vigorous and
pithy expression of a cold and prosaic good sense, began with Sir John
Davies and buried itself in fantastic affectations in Donne; religious
verse had become popular in the gloomy allegories of Quarles and the
tender refinement which struggles through a jungle of puns and
extravagances in George Herbert. But what poetic life really remained
was to be found only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of lyric
singers like Herrick, whose grace is untouched by passion and often
disfigured by coarseness and pedantry; or in the school of Spenser's
more direct successors, where Browne in his pastorals and the two
Fletchers, Phineas and Giles, in their unreadable allegories, still
preserved something of their master's sweetness, if they preserved
nothing of his power.

[Sidenote: His early poems.]

Milton was himself a Spenserian; he owned to Dryden in later years that
"Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton
he dwells lovingly on "the sage and solemn tones" of the "Faerie Queen,"
its "forests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the
ear." But of the weakness and affectation which characterized Spenser's
successors he had not a trace. In the "Allegro" and "Penseroso," the
first results of his retirement at Horton, we catch again the fancy and
melody of the Elizabethan verse, the wealth of its imagery, its wide
sympathy with nature and man. There is a loss perhaps of the older
freedom and spontaneity of the Renascence, a rhetorical rather than
passionate turn in the young poet, a striking absence of dramatic power,
and a want of subtle precision even in his picturesque touches. Milton's
imagination is not strong enough to identify him with the world which he
imagines; he stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a distance,
ordering it and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect he
falls both in his earlier and later poems below Shakspere or Spenser,
the deficiency is all but compensated by his nobleness of feeling and
expression, the severity of his taste, his sustained dignity, and th