t classical of all Elizabethan playwrights,
and just as he anticipates the 17th and 18th centuries in his prose, so
in his dramas we may discover the first competent handling of those
principles and restrictions which, more clearly enunciated by Ben
Jonson, became iron laws for the post-Elizabethan dramatists.

It is this "balance between classic precedent and romantic freedom[132]"
that constitutes his supreme importance, not only in Elizabethan
literature, but even in the history of subsequent English drama. From
Lyly we may trace the current of romanticism, through Shakespeare, to
Goethe and Victor Hugo; in Lyly also we may see the first embodiment of
that classical tradition which even Shakespeare's "purge" could do
nothing to check, and which was eventually to lay its dead hand upon the
art of the 18th century. May we not say more than this? Is he not the
first name in a continuous series from 1580 to our own day, the first
link in the chain of dramatic development, which binds the "singing room
of Powles" to the Lyceum of Irving? And it is interesting to notice that
the principle which he was the first to express shows at the present
moment evident signs of exhaustion; for its future developments seem to
be limited to that narrow strip of social melodrama, which lies between
the devil of the comic opera and the deep sea of the Ibsenic problem
play. Indeed it would not be altogether fanciful, I think, to say that
_The Importance of being Earnest_ finishes the process that _Campaspe_
started; and to view that process as a circle begun in euphuism, and
completed in aestheticism.

[132] Bond, II. p. 266.

CHAPTER IV.

CONCLUSION.

At the beginning of this essay I gave a short account of the main facts
of our author's life, reserving my judgment upon his character and
genius until after the examination of his works. That examination which
I have now concluded is far too superficial in character to justify a
psychological synthesis such as that advocated by M. Hennequin[133]. But
though this essay cannot claim to have exhausted the subject of the ways
and means of Lyly's art, yet in the course of our survey we have had
occasion to notice several interesting points in reference to his mind
and character, which it will be well to bring together now in order to
give a portrait, however inadequate, of the man who played so important
a part in English literature.

[133] _La Critique Scientifique._

Nash