English woman (Mrs. Coleman) who ever in an English drama appeared upon it.' Lawes, Milton's old collaborator and friend, supplied part of the music. The success of this experiment encouraged D'Avenant to move to the Cockpit, where The History of Sir Francis Drake, The Cruelties of the Spaniards in Peru, and other plays were produced. After the Restoration he held the office of Poet Laureate for eight years, and co-operated with Dryden in adapting' Shakespeare to the Restoration stage. His dramas were published by his widow in one large folio volume in 1673.

D'Avenant, like Shirley, forms a connecting link between the Elizabethan and the Restoration Drama. His plays are full of incident and careless melody, but do not show any real power of drawing characters or developing situations. Fletcher and Shakespeare are the formative influence of D'Avenant's dramatic attempts, his admiration for the latter leading him even to countenance, if he did not create, the scandal which connected him with the great dramatist in a closer relationship than that of god-parent. His efforts to preserve play-acting from extinction under the Commonwealth, and to hand down to the age of Dryden the traditions of the great dramatic period of his youth, give to D'Avenant a more substantial claim to the gratitude of posterity than is furnished by his plays or poems. The fifteen surviving comedies by Richard Brome illustrate the kind of dramatic facility

Richard Brome that can be acquired, with care and

(d. 1652).

patience, by a man of average ability. Beyond the fact that he had been a servant to Ben Jonson, scarcely anything is known about the life of their author. The Jovial Crew, a picture of the manners of a society of professional beggars, possibly suggested by Fletcher's Beggar's Bush, is perhaps the best of his plays.

The Antipodes and The Northern Lass also deserve specific mention, the one for the quaintness of its conception, the other for the pathetic fate of the heroine. Brome's dramas seem to have been acted with much success, and were collected and published in 1653, presumably after the death of the author, by one Alexander Brome, whose relationship to the dramatist is uncertain.

(1605-1634).

A more interesting member of Ben's adopted family was Thomas Randolph, who was born near Thomas Randolph Daventry in 1605, educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow, and died at the age of thirty. His dramatic work, though immature, academic, and too strongly influenced by Ben Jonson, is indicative of considerable power. His best plays are The Muses' Looking Glass, a kind of dramatic satire, where the moral purpose of comedy is indicated in a series of altercations between personified abstractions, and a bright little pastoral drama Amyntas, or The Impossible Dowry, which was acted before the king at Whitehall, and was published in 1638. The former of these is really a series of dialogues rather than a drama, and the latter is hampered by the artificial character of its setting; but both have touches of true comedy, which raise them above the level of mere academic exercises. Among the numerous minor dramatists of the age a few only are deserving of mention. Henry Glapthorne, after a short period of fame due to a laudatory article in the Retrospective Review of 1824, is now even more neglected than he deserves to be. Of his life scarcely a single fact is known. The five plays that are known to be his were written and acted between 1639 and 1643, and were revived with some success after the Restoration. The best is a pastoral tragedy, Argalus and Parthenia, founded on an episode in Sidney's Arcadia.

Minor Playwriters.

His Albertus Wallenstein is interesting as an attempt at historical tragedy, published only five years after the event -the murder of Wallenstein-with which it deals. The drama, however, is crude and ineffective, and wholly fails to rise to the possibilities of the subject. Fluent diction and occasional touches of vigour are the only merits that can be claimed for Glapthorne's plays.

Less admirable still as a dramatist is William Cartwright (1611-1631), a writer of panegyric verses and florid sermons, and a prominent member of the tribe of Ben,' who produced three tragi-comedies and one comedy, The Ordinary, an attempt at realistic drama after the manner of Jonson. At Court, and among the wits of the Caroline age, his reputation as a writer was very great, but neither his plays nor his poems deserve more than a passing notice among the literary products of the time.

Sir John Suckling, whose merits as a writer of light verse are discussed in the next chapter, produced three tragedies, of which the best is Aglaura. He also wrote one comedy, The Goblins, a sprightly but bewildering extravaganza, full of unexpected incidents and lively dialogue, carried on in slip-shod and careless verse. Aglaura has the same breathless tumult of incidents, while it terminates in so ghastly a fashion that for representation at Court the author was fain to compose an alternative fifth act, which transforms the tragedy into a tragicomedy.

Shakerley Marmion, who died in 1639, while returning from service in Suckling's troop against the Scots, wrote three plays, of which The Antiquary is the most notable. The humour of the comedy, though not of a high order, is pleasant and unobjectionable. A somewhat higher place must be accorded to Sir John Denham's only play, The Sophy. The scene of this tragedy is laid in Turkey, and

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the pathetic dignity of the plot won for it immediate popu larity. Prince Merza, blinded by his father, but recalled from thoughts of revenge by the appeal of his child, is a noble figure: and in its moral purpose, no less than in the careful construction of its verse, the play contrasts very favourably with most of the other tragedies of the Caroline age.

William Habington (1605-1654), the author of Castara, produced one play, a tragi-comedy, The Queen of Arragon, not deserving of notice as a drama, but containing some poetical passages.

Thomas May (1595-1650), the historian of the Long Parliament, who is said by Clarendon to have joined the Parliamentary side through chagrin at not being appointed successor to Ben Jonson as poet-laureate, was the author of several plays, of which the best are The Old Couple and The Heir. His verse is fluent and sometimes musical, but apart from this his plays possess no special merit.

It is unnecessary to do more than mention Jaspar Mayne (1604-1672), a clergyman and man of learning, who wrote two comedies; Robert Davenport, whose best plays are a tragedy, King John and Matilda, and a comedy, The City Nightcap; Thomas Rawlins, engraver of the Mint under Charles I. and Charles II., who was the author of a tragedy called The Rebellion; and Thomas Nabbes, the author of many plays, of which an elaborate cosmos, alone survives. masque, Micro

The closing of the theatres at the beginning of the Civil War brought to an end the greatest dramatic period in English history, and when they re-opened at the Restoration a new school arose, the treatment of which belongs to the age of Dryden.

CHAPTER V.

CAROLINE LYRICAL POETS.

THE lyrical poets of the reign of Charles I. form a group with strongly marked characteristics of its own. Many of them had sat at the feet of Ben Jonson, and caught something of his lyrical power; but the predominating influence among the younger men was that of Donne. The universities were at this time hotbeds of poetry,' and at the universities Donne's verses were eagerly read, and became the models for all aspiring poetasters. With their etherialized sensuality, strange and overwrought conceits, and careless richness of rhythm, they were among the earliest examples in England of that new school of poetry which Gongora had developed in Spain and Marini had perfected in Italy,--the first-fruits of that metaphysical' group of poets, whose extravagances produced the classical reaction which began with Cowley and Waller and culminated in the age of Dryden. All these Caroline lyrical poets belonged to the Cavalier party, and most of them lived to share its misfortunes. Both in the careless gaiety of Carew and Herrick, and in the religious fervour of Herbert and Crashaw, we may trace an undercurrent of protest against that gloomy Puritan asceticism which seemed to eliminate joy from life, and beauty from worship. The sense of delight in love and nature, in the worth and wonder of common things, that breaks at times through the incubus of metaphor and conceit in these lyrics, was the last pro