IT were no less than supererogation to adduce evidences of the romantic spirit of the age of Shakespeare. No period in English literature is more distinctly romantic; and although in England criticism is less affected by creative literature, and has had less effect upon it, than in France, it is only natural to suppose that Elizabethan criticism should be as distinctly romantic as the works of imagination of which it is presumably an exposition. As early as Wilson's _Rhetoric_ we find evidences of that independence of spirit in questions of art which seems typical of the Elizabethan age; and none of the writers of this period exhibits anything like the predisposition of the French mind to submit instinctively to any rule, or set of rules, which bears the stamp of authority. From the outset the element of nationality colors English criticism, and this is especially noticeable in the linguistic discussions of the age. At the very time when Sidney was writing the _Defence of Poesy_, Spenser's old teacher, Mulcaster, wrote: "I love Rome, but London better; I favor Italy, but England more; I honor the Latin, but I worship the English."[536] It is this spirit which pervades what may be called the chief expression of the romantic temper in Elizabethan criticism,--Daniel's _Defence of Rhyme_ (1603), written in answer to Campion's attack on rhyme in the _Observations in the Art of English Poesy_. The central argument of Daniel's defence is that the use of rhyme is sanctioned both by custom and by nature--"custom that is before all law, nature that is above all art."[537] He rebels against that conception which would limit "Within a little plot of Grecian ground The sole of mortal things that can avail;" and he shows that each age has its own perfections and its own usages. This attempt at historical criticism leads him into a defence of the Middle Ages; and he does not hesitate to assert that even classical verse had its imperfections and deficiencies. In the minutiae of metrical criticism, also, he is in opposition to the neo-classic tendencies of the next age; and his favorable opinion of _enjambement_ and his unfavorable comments on the heroic couplet[538] drew from Ben Jonson an answer, never published, in which the latter attempted to prove that the couplet is the best form of English verse, and that all other forms are forced and detestable.[539] II. _Classical Metres_