[824] They continued later in some towns, at Newcastle, for example, where they survived till 1598. At this date "Romeo" and the "Merchant of Venice" had already appeared. There were even some performances at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
[825] A drawing of this fresco, now destroyed, has been published by Sharp: "Hell-mouth and interior, from the chapel at Stratford-upon-Avon"; "A Dissertation on the pageants ... at Coventry," 1825, plate 6.
CHAPTER VII.
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
I.
In the autumn of the year 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of the Thames Street vintner, universally acknowledged the greatest poet of England, had been borne to his tomb in the transept of Westminster Abbey. Not far from him sleep the Plantagenet kings, his patrons, Edward III. and Richard II. wrapped in their golden robes. With them an epoch has drawn to its close; a new century begins, and this century is, for English thought, a century of decline, of repose, and of preparation.
So evident is the decline that even contemporaries perceive it; for a hundred years poets unceasingly mourn the death of Chaucer. They are no longer able to discover new ways; instead of looking forward as their master did, they turn, and stand with eyes fixed on him, and hands outstretched towards his tomb. An age seeking its ideal in the epoch that has just preceded it is an age of decline; so had been in past times the age of Statius, who had professed such a deep veneration for Virgil.
For a century thus the poets of England remain with their gaze fastened on the image of the singer they last heard, and at each generation their voice becomes weaker, like an echo that repeats another echo. Lydgate imitates Chaucer, and Stephen Hawes imitates Lydgate.[826]