sible opportunity of distinguishing chronologically--we find the
unmistakable marks of the new wine, of the unapproachable poetry proper,
which all criticism, all rationalisation can only indicate and not account
for. We have hardly left (if we take their counterparts later we have not
left) the wooden verse of _Gorboduc_, the childish rusticity of _Like Will
to Like_, when suddenly we stumble on the bower--

"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams"--

of George Peele, on the myriad graceful fancies of Lyly, on the exquisite
snatches of Greene, on the verses, to this day the high-water mark of
poetry, in which Marlowe speaks of the inexpressible beauty which is the
object and the despair of the poet. This is wonderful enough. But what is
more wonderful is, that these lightning flashes are as evanescent as
lightning. Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe himself, in probably the very next
passages, certainly in passages not very remote, tell us that this is all
matter of chance, that they are all capable of sinking below the level of
Sackville at his even conceivably worst, close to the level of Edwards, and
the various anonymous or half-anonymous writers of the dramatic
miscellanies just noted. And then beyond these unequal wits arises the
figure of Shakespere; and the greatest work of all literature swims slowly
into our ken. There has been as yet no history of this unique phenomenon
worthy of it: I have not the least pretension to supply one that shall be
worthy. But at least the uniqueness of it shall here have due celebration.
The age of Pericles, the age of Augustus, the age of Dante, had no such
curious ushering-in unless time has dealt exceptional injustice to the
forerunners of all of them. We do not, in the period which comes nearest in
time and nature to this, see anything of the same kind in the middle space
between Villon and Ronsard, between Agrippa d'Aubigne and Corneille. Here
if anywhere is the concentrated spirit of a nation, the thrice-decocted
blood of a people, forcing itself into literary expression through mediums
more and more worthy of it. If ever the historical method was justified (as
it always is), now is its greatest justification as we watch the gradual
improvements, the decade-by-decade, almost year-by-year acquisitions, which
lead from Sackville to Shakespere.

The rising sap showed itself in two very different ways, in two branches of
the national tree. In the first place, we have the group of