It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak,
the plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,--
such, for example, as Jonson,--were far superior to the best
works of imagination in other departments. Therefore, though we
conceive that, from causes which we have already investigated,
our poetry must necessarily have declined, we think that, unless
its fate had been accelerated by external attacks, it might have
enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might have been kept alive by
the drama till its place could, in some degree, be supplied by
taste,--that there would have been scarcely any interval between
the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation.
The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any
degree of justice before the middle of the eighteenth century,
might then have been the recognised standards of excellence
during the latter part of the seventeenth; and he and the great
Elizabethan writers might have been almost immediately succeeded
by a generation of poets similar to those who adorn our own
times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They
prohibited theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole
race of dramatists as enemies of morality and religion. Much
that is objectionable may be found in the writers whom they
reprobated; but whether they took the best measures for stopping
the evil appears to us very doubtful, and must, we think, have
appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the lapse of a few
years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out return
to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of