No sooner had this great man passed away, and an earnest age with him, and Charles mounted the throne, than from the darkest recesses of the stews and the taverns, from the depths within depths of Alsatia or Paris, the whole tribe of dancers, fiddlers, drabs, mimes, stage-players, and playwrights, knowing that their enemy was dead, and their hour of harvest had come, emerged in swarming multitudes--multitudes swelled by the vast tribe of play-goers, who had been counting the hours since a Falstaff had made them laugh, an Ophelia made them weep, and a Lear made them tremble. And had this only issued in the revival of the drama of Shakspeare and Johnson, few could have had much to say in objection; for that, in general, was as pure as it was powerful. But, alas, besides them there had been a Beaumont, a Fletcher, and a Massinger, with their unutterable abominations. Nay, the king and courtiers had imported from France a taste which required for its gratification a licentiousness still more abandoned, and to be cast, besides, into forms and shapes, as stiff, stately, and elaborate as the material was vile, and were not contented with pollution unless served up in a new, piquant, and unnatural manner. Our poet understood this movement of his time right well, and determined to conform to it. He knew that he could, better than any man living, pander to the popular appetite for the melodramatic, for the grandiloquent, and for the obscene. He knew the taste of Charles, and that he, above all cooks, could dress up a _ragout_ of that putrid perfection which his king relished. And he set himself with his whole might so to do, and for thirty years and more continued his degradation of genius--a degradation unexampled, whether we consider the powers of the writer, the coarseness, quantity, and elaboration of the pollutions he perpetrated, or the length of time in which he was employed, in thus "profaning the God-given strength and marring the lofty line."