Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the base of Shakespeare's colossal statue. Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_, described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day. VIII.--THE OFFICE OF THE POETS There is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry just now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a poet--or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour. There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit--joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly.