THOMAS MIDDLETON
If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory
of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English
literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of
English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric
triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and
Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their
immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other
province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb
exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of
the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of
English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by
comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap
in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an
energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the
garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the
underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the
rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve
the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes
of literature.
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