_The Castle of Perseverance_, in which we have all the cardinal virtues
and all the cardinal sins contending for the possession of _Humanum
Genus_, the _Human Race_ being presented as a new-born child, who grows
old and dies in the course of the play; but it was a great stride in art
when human nature and human history began again to be exemplified after a
simple human fashion, in the story, that is, of real men and women,
instead of by allegorical personifications of the analysed and abstracted
constituents of them. Allegory has her place, and a lofty one, in
literature; but when her plants cover the garden and run to seed,
Allegory herself is ashamed of her children: the loveliest among them are
despised for the general obtrusiveness of the family. Imitation not only
brings the thing imitated into disrepute, but tends to destroy what
original faculty the imitator may have possessed.




CHAPTER IV.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ELIZABETHAN ERA.


Poets now began to write more smoothly--not a great virtue, but
indicative of a growing desire for finish, which, in any art, is a great
virtue. No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for
finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a
statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or
vagueness, or even vulgarity of result--irrespective altogether of its
idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country,
roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses;