When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its _literary_ vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate. Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes: In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption. . . . Walpole . . . promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898]. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace. But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not Walpole but the _Zeitgeist_ that was responsible for his failure in one literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England before its final extinction.