The delicate skill of the
workmanship can only be appreciated by careful and thorough study; but
that the infusion of poetic fancy and feeling into the generally comic
and satiric style is hardly unworthy of the comparison which I have
ventured to challenge, I will take but one brief extract for evidence:
Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
Upon a bashful rose.
Here for once even "that celestial thief" John Milton has impaired
rather than improved the effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed from an
earlier and inferior poet. His use of Middleton's exquisite image is not
quite so apt--so perfectly picturesque and harmonious--as the use to
which it was put by the inventor.
Nothing in the age of Shakespeare is so difficult for an Englishman of
our own age to realize as the temper, the intelligence, the serious and
refined elevation of an audience which was at once capable of enjoying
and applauding the roughest and coarsest kinds of pleasantly, the rudest
and crudest scenes of violence, and competent to appreciate the finest
and the highest reaches of poetry, the subtlest and the most sustained
allusions of ethical or political symbolism.
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