Shakespeare, of Johnson, are sufficient to remind us of the grandeur to
which the Elizabethan drama attained, under the influence of prosperity
at home, victory abroad, and the quickening of the national
intelligence which followed the revival of learning. But while the
stage reflected all that was most noble, it reflected also all that
was most base in human nature. Ecclesiastical discipline had been laid
aside, and the unrestrained passions of men, which in actual life found
vent in violence and debauchery, were gratified by the dramatic
representation of the worst crimes and most vitiated tastes. The
Puritans brought about reformation and self-restraint, by enforcing a
new code of morals all the more rigid from the looseness which on every
side they found to combat. In closing the theatres, they were actuated,
in Mr. Green's words, by the hatred "of God-fearing men against the
foulest depravity presented in a poetic and attractive form."[56]

While the drama reflected alike the good and the bad, all the finer
aspirations of the time found expression in poetry. Spenser, Sackville,
Drayton, Donne, Hall, the two Fletchers, are but leaders in a band of
more than two hundred, who made this period unrivalled in the annals of
English poetry. It was a time of unexampled prosperity, of an enlarged
freedom, of an active intelligence, when men were eagerly seeking for
whatever was novel and brilliant; when translations without number of
the classical writers and contemporary foreign works were welcomed
alike with the "costly attire of the new cut, the Dutch hat, the French
hose, the Spanish rapier, the Italian hilt." "It is a world to see how
Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than the language will allow, to
eat finer bread than is made of wheat, or wear finer cloth than is made
of wool." Such are the words in which John Lyly, the Euphuist,
characterized his own time, and they were the words of one who
expressed in his own writings the tendency to fanciful exaggeration,