is also a pretty piece, like his "Song" (attributed wrongly to Carew).
Shirley's works were often acted at the beginning of the Restoration, but he refused to write more dramas. The shock of the great fire of 1666 is said to have caused the deaths, on the same day, of himself and of his wife. The blank verse of Shirley is seldom distinguished. His numerous works suffer somewhat because they come at the end of a long period in which talent like his, with defects of taste often greater than his, have satiated and wearied all but the special student and enthusiastic devotee of the drama. The minor stars in the galaxy of playwrights almost defy enumeration.
Space does not permit estimates of the last dramatists of "the first temple," Randolph, Suckling—whose dramatic verse is as chaotically bad as several of his lyrics are exquisite; Davenant, who tried to keep alive a semblance of the drama at the end of Cromwell's protectorate; Brome, Cartwright, Mayne, and others. The blank verse in which the elder poets had so often excelled was left to the care of Milton; the blank verse of the stage became formless, and, during the Restoration, rhymed heroic couplets usurped its place.
[1] As I write, an accidental "fourteener" meets the eyes in the heading of a magazine article—"Discovery of the Missing Link by Georgiana Knight". This metre does not seem the best in which to render Homer.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE WRITERS.
In sketching the history of the English drama from its beginnings to the close of Ben Jonson's career, we have passed through a long tract of years, rich in other than poetic literature. We must now return to the writers in prose who came after Ascham and Sidney, and lived through the last period of Elizabeth, and in the reigns of James I, Charles I, and the Commonwealth.