But in losing the stage the Restoration drama has lost everything, while the Elizabethan is yet a living and working force. It powerfully co-operated in the splendid revival of English poetry at the end of last century; it is at this moment an inspirer and a nurse of young genius. It is inconceivable that the Restoration drama as a whole should inspire anyone, or that it should count for anything as a factor in future developments of literature. One is a perennial plant, which may die down to the root in ungenial seasons, but will assuredly put forth new flowers; the other is a fossil, curious and in some measure beautiful, but devoid of vital force. And for this, the merely intellectual merits of both being so considerable, no reason can be given but that one is on the whole poetical, and therefore living, the other on the whole prosaic, and therefore inert. Hence we may prophesy of the success of the endeavour of Ibsen, and other men of distinguished talent, to produce dramas conceived in an entirely realistic spirit, and entirely devoted to the problems of modern society. Such competitions will be valuable _pièces justificatives_ for the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, but they will be extinct as literary forces long ere the end of the twentieth. This, nevertheless, is to be said for the Restoration dramatists, that their art is not an imitation of an extinct form of the drama, but is at least something new, really expressive of the sentiments of their generation. The imitation of Shakespeare could only have produced gross unreality, which must have degenerated still further into mere inanity. The playwrights did what the contemporary painters should have done, they fell back, in a measure, upon realism when high imagination was no longer possible. If they had gone further in this direction their works would have possessed more intrinsic merit, and have claimed a more important place in the history of culture. Their tragedies would not so often have been rendered unnatural by the employment of rhyme, and their comedies would have exhibited the manners and the morals of the English nation, and not merely of the playgoing part of it. It cannot be believed that the comedy of that age affords anything like so faithful a picture of the seventeenth century as Fielding's novels do of the eighteenth. The realistic tendency was chiefly conspicuous in the closer approach to the language of common life, and in the more logical character even of appeals to emotion. The extravagant transports of heroes and heroines only betray that true imagination had grown cold; but the manly nervous sense and the almost forensic reasoning so often found in their company show that a new stratum had really been touched.