the third is peculiar in English literature. Elsewhere it is common
enough. That tragedy should be stately, decorous, and on the whole somewhat
uneventful as far as visible action goes,--comedy bustling, crammed with
incident, and quite regardless of decorum,--might seem a law of nature to
the audience of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even to
the audience of Moliere and Racine. But the vast and final change, the
inception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy,
comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little of
a break in the English mind, that _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ and _Gorboduc_,
though they were presented to the same audiences, and in all probability
written within ten years of each other at furthest, seem to belong to
different worlds of literature and society. The two comedies just noticed
are framed upon no literary model at all as wholes, but simply upon the
model of human nature. _Gorboduc_ is framed, though not with absolute
fidelity, on the model of the tragedies of Seneca, which had, during the
early years of the sixteenth century, mastered the attention of the
literary playwrights of Italy, France, and even to some extent Germany, and
which determined for three hundred years, at any rate, the form of the
tragedy of France. This model--which may be briefly described as the model
of Greek tragedy, still further pruned of action, with the choruses
retained, but estranged from their old close connection with the dialogue,
and reduced to the level of elaborate lyrical moralisings, and with the
tendency to such moralising in dialogue as well as in chorus largely
increased--was introduced in England with hardly less advantage than
abroad. Sackville, one of the reputed authors of _Gorboduc_, was far
superior to Jodelle, both as poet and as versifier, and the existence of
the two universities in England gave a support, to which nothing in France
corresponded, to the influence of learned writers. Indeed, till nearly the
close of our present period, the universities had the practical control of
literary production. But the genius of the English nation would have none
of Seneca. It refused him when he was first introduced by Sackville and
others; it refused him once more when Daniel and the set of the Countess of
Pembroke again attempted to introduce him; it refused him again and again
in the later seventeenth century, when imitation, first of his