an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. It
serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite,
schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less
what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about
'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such
terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples
the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are
scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is
not: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan.
We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans,
though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead.
Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if
'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs
to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the
horizon: whereas Donne--a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one--had by
1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those
wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to
Jacobean and Caroline poetry.

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of
exact knowledge; and man (_improbus homo_) with his wicked inventions is
for ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled--and, if you are wise,
thank Heaven--that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital
difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up
to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our
admirable conclusions to ruins.

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as