There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no single man invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originally attained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation working through innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. But he did not invent it; he did not even make any attempt to invent it; and had this first English tragedy been generally followed, we should have been for an unknown period in the land of bondage, in the classical dungeon which so long retained the writers of a nation, certainly not, at the time of the appearance of _Gorboduc_, of less literary promise than our own. In describing these tentatives and failures it will be impossible here to enter into any lengthened criticism of particular works. We shall have to content ourselves with a description of the general lines and groups, which may be said to be four in number: (1) The few unimportant and failing followers of Sackville; (2) The miscellaneous farce-and-interlude-writers, who, incult and formless as their work was, at least maintained the literary tradition; (3) The important and most interesting group of "university wits" who, with Marlowe at their head, made the blank verse line for dramatic purposes, dismissed, cultivated as they were, the cultivation of classical models, and gave English tragedy its Magna Charta of freedom and submission to the restrictions of actual life only, but who failed, from this cause or that, to achieve perfect life-likeness; and (4) The actor-playwrights who, rising from very humble beginnings, but possessing in their fellow Shakespere a champion unparalleled in ancient and modern times, borrowed the improvements of the University Wits, added their own stage knowledge, and with Shakespere's aid achieved the master drama of the world. A very few lines will suffice for the first group, who are the merest literary curiosities. Indeed the actual number of Senecan dramas in English is very small indeed, though there may possibly be some undiscovered in MS. The _Tancred and Gismund_ of Robert Wilmot (acted 1568, and of some merit), the _Cornelia_ of Garnier, translated by Kyd and printed in 1594, the curious play called _The Misfortunes of Arthur_, acted before the Queen in the Armada year, with "triumphs" partly devised by Francis Bacon, the two plays of Samuel Daniel, and a very few others, complete the list; indeed _Cornelia_, _Cleopatra_, and _Philotas_ are almost the only three that keep really close to the model. At a time of such unbounded respect for the classics, and when Latin plays of the same stamp were constantly acted at the universities, such a paucity of examples in English can only testify to a strong national distaste--an instinctive feeling that this would never do.