Lyric.
The poetical miscellanies of the later Elizabethan time, and the lyrical work of Sidney, Drayton, Jonson, Campion, and many others, brought out the song capacity of English as it had never been brought out before; and in the later portion of the period the poets specially known as "Caroline"—that is to say, of the period of Charles the First, with a smaller but remarkable contingent from the earlier days of his son—Herrick, Carew, Crashaw, Vaughan, Stanley, King, and almost dozens of others down to Rochester, Sedley, and Afra Behn—tried almost infinite varieties of line-length and line-adjustment with delightful results. And it is specially to be noticed that this lyric never broke down as couplet and blank verse were doing—that it always retained the tradition of metrical harmony which Wyatt and Surrey had reintroduced into English literary poetry, and which Spenser had perfected.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] A phrase of King James (VI. of Scotland and I. of England); v. inf. [Bks. III]. and [IV].
[81] That, reversing the order, Shakespeare borrowed this from them, is a recent notion, extremely difficult to reconcile with external evidence, and going in the very teeth of internal.
[82] Not, of course, that this is not sometimes most successful, as in Tennyson's
And flashing round and round and whirled | in an arch,
but that it is dangerous, and if often used would be intolerable.
[83] Published in 1667, and so more than thirty years after Comus. But perhaps begun at least fifteen years earlier.
[84] To give a thoroughly satisfactory discussion of Milton's prosody would need space quite out of proportion here. The writer has done what he could, in this direction, in the long chapter devoted to the subject in his larger History. But some examples, illustrations, and parallel scannings under different systems may be added to the text of this Manual. And first in regard to printing: