that nickname for the time-honoured one which calls him the last of
the Elizabethans. For us, to-day, with our bountiful acknowledgment of
all that we owe to the great body of dramatic poets who flourished
during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half of
the seventeenth, for us with our many collected editions of the works
of these men it is somewhat difficult to realize the benighted
condition in which our fellows were situated a century ago.
Elizabethan drama to by far the greater number of our great
grandparents meant Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone; to us
Shakespeare is only the sun of a great dramatic planetary system, and
the corrected view is largely owing to the efforts of one
revolutionary critic, and that critic was Charles Lamb. His earliest
letters show that he had revelled in this by-way of literature, and
had there found much that was of the best comparatively forgotten, or
at least wholly neglected, and he gladly availed himself of an
opportunity afforded for selecting striking passages from the English
dramatic poets. "Specimens are becoming fashionable," he wrote. "We
have 'Specimens of Ancient English Poets,' 'Specimens of Modern
English Poets,' 'Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,' without
end. They used to be called 'Beauties'! You have seen 'Beauties of
Shakspeare'? so have many people that never saw any beauties in
Shakspeare." Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the
unfortunate clerical forger, Dodd, in the scheme which he had in hand.
When we turn to the "Specimens" themselves we discover them to be fine
indeed, and in reading them and the brief but pregnant notes upon
them, we marvel at the sureness of the touch and the maturity of the
writer. The notes, or commentary, rarely extend beyond a score of
lines, and are most often far below that, yet they are always
wonderfully pertinent; there is "no philology, no antiquarianism, no
discussion of difficult or corrupt passages," no pedantry in fact, or