‘Or whether (as some sager sing), The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr, with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying, There on beds of violets blue, And fresh-blown roses washed in dew—’ but why quote what all the world knows?—where shall we find such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in anything written for five and twenty years before him? True, he was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one; but there was no one in his generation who could have written either ‘Comus’ or ‘Samson Agonistes.’ And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he could be, and bitter; but he did not live in a really humorous age: and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the foxhound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape. After all, the great fact stands, that the only lasting poet of that generation was a Puritan; one who, if he did not write dramas in sport, at least acted dramas in earnest. For drama means, etymologically, action and doing: and of the drama there are, and always will be, two kinds: one the representative, the other the actual; and for a world wherein there is no superabundance of good deeds, the latter will be always the better kind. It is good to represent heroical action in verse, and on the stage: it is good to ‘purify,’ as old Aristotle has it, ‘the affections by pity and terror.’ There is an ideal tragedy, and an ideal comedy also, which one can imagine as an integral part of the highest Christian civilisation. But when ‘Christian’ tragedy sinks below the standard of heathen Greek tragedy; when, instead of setting forth heroical deeds, it teaches the audience new possibilities of crime, and new excuses for those crimes; when, instead of purifying the affections by pity and terror, it confounds the moral sense by exciting pity and terror merely for the sake of excitement, careless whether they be well or ill directed: then it is of the devil, and the sooner it returns to its father the better for mankind. When, again, comedy, instead of stirring a divine scorn of baseness, or even a kindly and indulgent smile at the weaknesses and oddities of humanity, learns to make a mock of sin,—to find excuses for the popular frailties which it pretends to expose,—then it also is of the devil, and to the devil let it go; while honest and earnest men, who have no such exceeding love of ‘Art’ that they must needs have bad art rather than none at all, do the duty which lies nearest them amid clean whitewash and honest prose. The whole theory of ‘Art, its dignity and vocation,’ seems to us at times questionable, if coarse facts are to be allowed to weigh (as we suppose they are) against delicate theories. If we are to judge by the example of Italy, the country which has been most of all devoted to the practice