Humour_, _The Silent Woman_, etc.). Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote in
collaboration, are full of elevation, of delicacy and grace expressed in
a style which is regarded by their fellow-countrymen as exceptionally
beautiful.

PROSE WRITERS: LYLY; SIDNEY; BACON; BURTON.--In prose this amazing
period was equally productive. Lyly, who corresponds approximately to the
French Voiture, created _euphemism_: that is, witty preciosity. Sidney,
in his _Arcadia_ furnished a curious example of the chivalric romance.
Further in his _Defence of Poesie_, he founded literary criticism.
Francis Bacon, historian, moralist, philosopher, perhaps collaborator
with Shakespeare, has a place equally allocated to him in a history of
literature as in a history of philosophical ideas. Robert Burton,
moralist or rather _Meditator_, who gave himself the pseudonym of
Democritus Junior because he was consumed with sadness, left a great
work, but one in which there are many quotations, called _The Anatomy of
Melancholy_. There is much analogy between him and the French Senancour.
Sterne, without acknowledgment, profusely pilfered from him. He is
thoroughly English. He did not create melancholy but he greatly
contributed to it and made a specialty of it. Despite his pranks and
whimsicality, he possessed high literary merit.

POETRY: WALLER.--The English seventeenth century, strictly speaking,
virtually commencing about 1625, was inferior to the sixteenth, that has
just been considered, which is easily explained by the civil wars
distracting England at this period. In poetry, on the one hand, may be
noticed the softened and pleasing Epicureans, of which the most prominent
representative was Waller, a witty man of the world, who dwelt long in
France, and was a friend of Saint-Evremond (who himself spent a portion
of his life in England). Waller made a very fine eulogy of his cousin