Christian burial by the Presbyterian garrison, who, however, eventually allowed his body to be placed in Chichester Cathedral. At his burial there was an unseemly protestation, and at the close of a wild diatribe, a fanatic flung into the grave a copy of Chillingworth's book "to rot," he said, "with its author, and see corruption." Chillingworth's sermons were collected in 1664. FROM THE "RELIGION OF PROTESTANTS" As nothing by water can be made more cold than water, nor by fire more hot than fire, nor by honey more sweet than honey, nor by gall more bitter than gall; or if you will suppose it infused without means, then that power which infuseth into the understanding assent, which bear analogy to sight in the eye, must also infuse evidence, that is, visibility into the object and look what degree of assent is infused into the understanding, at least the same degree of evidence must be infused into the object. And for you to require a strength of credit beyond the appearance of the object's credibility, is all one as if you should require me to go ten mile an hour upon a horse that will go but five; to discern a man certainly William Chillingworth After Kyte's Engraving through a mist or cloud that makes him not certainly discernible; to hear a sound more clearly than it is audible; to understand a thing more fully than it is intelligible; and he that doth so, I may well expect that his next injunction will be that I must see something that is invisible, hear something inaudible, understand something that is wholly unintelligible. The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone, in a sort of Essays underwood of Theophrastian character-sketches. Among these must be named the popular Microcosmography (1628) of JOHN EARLE (1601-1668), and the Resolves of OWEN FELTHAM (1600?-1677?), which was published about the same time. These latter were technically essays. The fashion for these studies was greatly encouraged by the decay of the drama, and particularly by that of comedy. This decay is one of the most extraordinary features of the time, and requires particular attention. The brief and magnificent school of English drama, begun by Kyd and Marlowe scarcely The Decline of the Drama more than a generation before, having blazed and crackled like a forest fire fed with resinous branches, sank almost in a moment, and lingered only as a heap of white ash and glowing charcoal. The causes of the rapid decline of the drama have been sought in the religious and political disturbances of the country; but if we examine closely, we find that stage-poetry had begun to be reduced in merit before those disturbances had taken definite shape. It will probably be safer to recognise that the opening out of national interests took attention more and more away from what had always been an exotic entertainment, a pleasure mainly destined for the nobles and their retainers. There was a general growth of enthusiasm, of public feeling, throughout England, and this was not favourable to the cultivation of a species of entertainment such as the drama had been under Elizabeth, a cloistered art destined exclusively for pleasure, without a didactic or a moral aim. For many years there continued to persist an interest in the stage wide enough to fill the theatres, in spite of the growing suspicion of such amusements; but the audiences rapidly grew less select and less refined, less able to appreciate the good, and more tolerant of the rude and bad. In technique there was a falling off so abrupt as to be quite astonishing, and not easily to be accounted for. The "sons" of Ben Jonson, trained as they had been at his feet, sank into forms that were primitive in their rudeness. The curious reader may pursue the vanishing genius of poetic drama down through the writings of Randolph, of Jasper Mayne, of Brome, of Cartwright, till he finds himself a bewildered spectator of the last gibberings and contortions of the spectre in the inconceivable "tragedies" of Suckling. If the wits of the universities, highly trained, scholarly young men, sometimes brilliantly efficient in other branches of poetry, could do no better than this, what wonder that in ruder hands the very primitive notions with regard to dramatic construction Title-page of Feltham's "Resolves " THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA 7 and propriety were forgotten. Before Shakespeare had been a quarter of a century in his grave, Shirley was the only person left writing in England who could give to fiction in dialogue the very semblance of a work of art. We must pause for a moment to observe a highly interesting phenomenon. At the very moment when English drama was crumbling to dust, the drama of France was springing into vigorous existence. The conjectured year of the performance of Our last great play, the Broken Heart, of Ford, is that of the appearance of the earliest of Corneille's tragedies. So rapidly did events follow one another, that when that great man produced Le Cid, English drama was moribund; when his Rodogune was acted, it was dead; and the appearance of his Agésilas saw it re-arisen under Dryden in totally different forms, and as though from a different hemisphere. It is impossible not to reflect that if the dramatic instinct had been strong in Milton, the profoundest of all religious tragedies might happen to be not that Polyeucte which we English have enviously to admire in the literature of France, but a play in which the noblest ideas of Puritanism might have Pierre Corneille been posed against worldly philosophy and sensual error. Yet even for a Milton in 1643 the ground would not have been clear as it was for Corneille. The French poet had but to gather together and lift into splendid distinction elements whose main fault had been their imperfection. For him, French tragedy, long preparing to blossom, was reaching its spring at last; for us, our too brief summer was at an end, and, cloyed with fruit, the drama was hurrying through its inevitable autumn. If Ben Jonson, tired and old, had felt any curiosity in glancing across the Channel, he might have heard of the success of a goodly number of pieces by a poet destined, more exactly than any Englishman, to carry out Jonson's own ideal of a tragic poet. He had desired that a great tragedian should specially excel in "civil prudence and eloquence," and to whom can these qualities be attributed if not to Corneille? The incoherent and scarce intelligible English dramatists of the decline were as blankly ignorant of the one as of the other. The laxity of versification which our poetic drama permitted itself had much to answer for in the degradation of style. Ben Jonson had been too stiff; Shakespeare, with a divine instinct, hung balanced across the point which divides hardness of versification from looseness; but in the soft hands of Fletcher, the borders were already overpast, his followers became looser and more sinuous still, and the comparative exactitude of Massinger and Shirley was compromised by their languor. The verse of Ford, it is true, is correct and elegant, with a slight rigidity that seems pre-Shakespearian. But among the names which follow these we find not one that understood what dramatic blank verse should be. If there be an exception, it is WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT, whose plays, although they smell too much of the lamp, and possess no aptitude for the theatre, pour a good deal of waxen beauty into moulds of stately metre. It was of this typical Oxford poet, who died, still very young, in 1643, that Ben Jonson said, "My son Cartwright writes all like a man." William Cartwright (1611-1643) was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester, and was born in September 1611 near Tewkesbury. (According to another but less probable account he was born in August 1615.) He was educated at Westminster, and was in 1628 elected student of Christ Church College, Oxford. He took his degree in 1635, and entered the Church, becoming "the most florid and seraphical preacher in the University." He was still at Oxford when the Civil War broke out, and suffered for his opinions. On the 29th of November 1643 he died. of what was called "camp-disease." The king went into mourning on the occasion of Cartwright's funeral in Christ Church Cathedral, and, even in the midst of the national troubles, the young poet's death was looked upon as a public calamity. Of his four plays the best-known, The Royal Slave, was acted in Oxford in 1636, and printed in 1639. Cartwright's poems were first collected in 1651. The extravagant opinion of his genius which prevailed in the middle of the seventeenth century is scarcely justified by his writings, although his plays have merit. He was very handsome, ardent, and eloquent, and all Oxford seems to have been captivated by his extraordinary personal charm. man Of the life of Richard Brome very little is known. He was Ben Jonson's servant in his youth, and there was friendship between master and until Jonson's death. The earliest known attempt which Brome made to produce a drama was in concert with Ben Jonson's son in 1623. Brome made no secret of his dependence on the greater poet, and he was accused of gathering up, in his own plays, Jonson's "sweepings." The most readable of his twenty plays are The Sparagus Garden, published in 1640; The Antipodes, 1640; and A Jovial Crew, 1641. At this time Brome's talent seems to have reached its highest point; he probably ceased to write plays when the theatres were closed in 1642. It is believed that Brome died in 1653. Reader to heere thou vill two faces finde. Richard Brome With Inscription by Alexander Brome Jasper Mayne (1604-1672), born at Hatherleigh in Devon, was educated at Westminster, and at Christ Church College, Oxford. He took holy orders in 1631, and in time became Canon of Christ Church and Archdeacon of Chichester. He |