JAMES SHIRLEY. [SHIRLEY was born in London about the year 1596, and lived through the Civil War and Commonwealth into the Restoration, dying in 1667. His copious dramatic activity began in 1625, in which year he produced the comedy entitled Love's Tricks. Before this, in 1618, he had published an imitation of Venus and Adonis under the title of Echo. His plays were produced in rapid succession up to 1641. In 1646 he published a volume of poems, chiefly erotic, and two small volumes of Masques etc. in 1653 and 1659.] Shirley was essentially an imitative not an original genius. His claim to a place among the great poets of his age rests solely upon his wonderful manipulative dexterity, his power of assimilating and reshaping the creations of his great predecessors. Towards the close of a grand period, perhaps even while its leading spirits are in full creative swing, two distinct tendencies manifest themselves. Men of independent mind separate themselves from the main current, and cast about for fields which the masters have left unoccupied. Men of more pliant and docile intellect follow humbly in the footsteps of the masters, and seize freely upon the wealth which they have accumulated. Shirley belonged to the latter class. He did not try to invent new types, or to say what had not been said before; but stored his mind with the thoughts and the imagery of his predecessors, and reproduced them with joyous facility. We may admire the fluency, the elegance, and the force of Shirley's verse, the ease and naturalness of his dramatic situations, but the attentive reader of his predecessors is never called upon to admire anything new. Fletcher was his chief model and exemplar, but he laid them all freely under contribution. The chief critical pleasure in reading him is the pleasure of memory. W. MINTO. A LULLABY. [From The Triumph of Beauty, a Masque, 1646.] Cease, warring thoughts, and let his brain But be smooth and calm agair.. Ye crystal rivers that are nigh, Each striving to excel the rest, When it is time to wake him, close your parts, And drop down from the tree with broken hearts. THE GARDEN. [From Poem, 1646.] This garden does not take my eyes, Would stock old Paradise again. These glories while you dote upon, Those tulips that such wealth display But I would see myself appear I' th' centre of my ground compose No woman here shall find me out, I'll moat it with my eyes' foul weather. No birds shall live within my pale, Upon whose death I'll try to write THE MIGHT OF DEATH. [From Cupid and Death, a Masque, 1653.] Victorious men of earth, no more Proclaim how wide your empires are; Though you bind in every shore, As night or day, Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey, Nor to these alone confined More quaint and subtle ways to kill; A DIRGE. [From The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, printed 1659.] The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Sceptre and crown And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill; But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still: Early or late They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath, The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon Death's purple altar now See, where the victor-victim bleeds: Your heads must come To the cold tomb, Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. 1 THOMAS RANDOLPH. [THOMAL RANDOLPH was born in the summer of 1605, at Dodford, in Northamptonshire, and died at Blatherwick. in the same county, in March 163. His drama of The Jealous Lovers was printed in 1632; the remainder of his works appeared posthumously in 1638.] It seems probable that in the premature death of Randolph, English literature underwent a very heavy loss. He died unexpectedly when he was only twenty-nine, leaving behind him a mass of writing at once very imperfect and very promising. The patronage of Ben Jonson, it would seem, rather than any very special bias to the stage, led him to undertake dramatic conposition, and though he left six plays behind him, it is by no means certain that he would have ended as a dramatist. His knowledge of stage requirements is very small indeed; it would be impossible to revive any of his pieces on the modern boards on account of the essential uncouthness of the movement, the length of the soliloquies, and the thinness of the plot. His three best dramas are distinguished by a vigorous directness and buoyancy of language, and by frequent passages of admirable rhetorical quality, but they are hardly plays at all, in the ordinary sense. His master-piece, The Muses' Looking Glass, is a moral essay in a series of dialogues, happily set in a framework of comedy; the Jealous Lovers is full, indeed, of ridiculous stratagems and brisk humorous transitions, but it has no sanity of plot; while Amyntas is a beautiful holiday dream, aery and picturesque, and ringing with peals of faery laughter, but not a play that any mortal company of actors could rehearse. Intellect and imagination Randolph possessed in full measure, but as he does not seem to have been born to excel in play-writing or in song-writing, and as he died too early to set his own mark on literature, we are left to speculate down what groove such brilliant and energetic gifts as his would finally have |