A history of English literature - Edward Albert

Echoes the sun, and doth unlace

Her at his rise, at his full stop

Packs and shuts up her gaudy shop,

Mistakes her cue, and doth display:

Thus Phillis antedates the day.

On Phillis, walking before Sunrise

(b) In blank verse conflicting movements are also apparent. In Milton the style reaches a magnificent climax. But in the drama, especially in the drama of minor playwrights of the ability of Suckling and Davenant, it becomes a huddle of verse and prose, so bad that one hesitates to say where the verse ends and the prose begins. It is the last stage of poetical decrepitude.

(c) The heroic couplet begins to appear, ushering in its long reign. We have it appearing as early as Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and Sandys’s Ovid (1626); but the true stopped couplet, as used by Dryden and developed by Pope, is usually set down to the credit of Cowley’s Davideis (1637), or Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1641), or the shorter poems of Edmund Waller (1606–87), who wrote stopped couplets as early as 1623. The heroic couplet will receive further notice in the next chapter.

TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS

Date	Poetry			Drama		Prose
Date	Lyric	Epic	Descriptive	Comedy	Tragedy	Historical	Religious	Miscellaneous
	Wither
				Massinger
1630	Milton[125]		Cowley		Ford
	Herbert		Milton
		Cowley		Suckling
	Suckling			Davenant
1640	Carew					Fuller
			Denham
							Browne[126]
	Crashaw							Milton
	Vaughan						Fuller	Howell
						Clarendon[127]		Browne
	Herrick						Baxter
	Lovelace
1650		Davenant					Taylor[128]
	Marvell							Hobbes
							Barrow	Walton
	Cowley
		Milton[129]	Chamberlayne
1660								Fuller
1670					Milton[130]