nce of some memorable work
or writer; while the total production of the twenty years exceeds in
originality and force, if not always in artistic perfection of form, the
production of any similar period in the world's history. The group of
University Wits, following the example of Lyly (who, however, in drama
hardly belongs to the most original school), started the dramas of history,
of romance, of domestic life; and, by fashioning through their leader
Marlowe the tragic decasyllable, put into the hands of the still greater
group who succeeded them an instrument, the power of which it is impossible
to exaggerate. Before the close of the century they had themselves all
ceased their stormy careers; but Shakespere was in the full swing of his
activity; Ben Jonson had achieved the freshest and perhaps capital fruit of
his study of humours; Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, and a crowd of
lesser writers had followed in his steps. In poetry proper the magnificent
success of _The Faerie Queen_ had in one sense no second; but it was
surrounded with a crowd of productions hardly inferior in their own way,
the chief being the result of the great and remarkable sonnet outburst of
the last decade of the century. The doggerel of the earlier years had
almost entirely disappeared, and in its place appeared the perfect
concerted music of the stanzas (from the sonnet and the Spenserian
downwards), the infinite variety of the decasyllable, and the exquisite
lyric snatches of song in the dramatists, pamphleteers, and music-book
writers. Following the general law already indicated, the formal advance in
prose was less, but an enormous stride was made in the direction of
applying it to its various uses. The theologians, with Hooker at their
head, produced almost the first examples of the measured and dignified
treatment of argument and exposition. Bacon (towards the latter end it is
true) produced the earliest specimens of his singular mixture of gravity
and fancy, pregnant thought and quaint expression. History in the proper
sense was hardly written, but a score of chroniclers, some not deficient in
narrative power, paved the way for future historians. In imaginative and
miscellaneous literature the fantastic extravagances of Lyly seemed as
though they might have an evil effect. In reality they only spurred
ingenious souls on to effort in refining prose, and in one particular
direction they had a most unlooked for result. The imitation in l