388 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



the thing was as it had to be. They tossed their beauties 

 like foam upon the tide of tumultuous and energetic inspira- 

 tion. Yet even in this carelessness and unconsidered 

 fecundity we recognise some of the noblest qualities of the 

 Elizabethan genius. There is nothing small or mean or 

 compassed in that art. Its vices are the vices of the prodigal, 

 not of the miser ; of the genial spendthrift, whose imprudence 

 lies nearer to generosity than to wanton waste. We pardon 

 many faults for the abounding vigour which marks these 

 poets ; for their wealth of suggestive ideas, their true sym- 

 pathy with nature, their insight into the workings of the 

 human heart, their profuse stream of fresh and healthy 

 feeling. 



When the Elizabethan spirit declined in England, it was 

 the business of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to 

 impose limits on all this * unchartered freedom ' of the 

 intellect. Then the good and bad effects of critical canons 

 and academical authority came to light. We had our Dryden 

 and our Pope, our Goldsmith and Swift, our Addison and 

 Steele, our Fielding and Johnson. But we had also a 

 deplorable lack of real poetry in comparison with the foison 

 of Elizabethan harvests. If not miserly, the English genius, 

 so far as fancy and imagination are concerned, became 

 thrifty. It erred by caution rather than by carelessness. It 

 doled its treasures out like one who has a well-filled purse 

 indeed, but who is not hopeful of turning all he touches into 

 gold like Midas. 



At the beginning of the Victorian age one sign of the 

 return to Elizabethanism was the license which poets allowed 

 themselves in matters pertaining to their art. Keats, in 

 ' Endymion,' Shelley, in 'The Revolt of Islam,' Byron, in 

 nearly every portion of his work, displayed Elizabethan faults 

 of emphasis, unpruned luxuriance, defective balance. It was 

 impossible, however, for the nineteenth century to be as 

 euphuistic or as chaotic as the sixteenth. Taste, trained by 

 critical education, and moulded by the writers of Queen 

 Anne's reign, might rebel against rules, but could not help 

 regarding them. In spite of these restraints, however, poets 



