physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated
to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of
parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy court in blind
security, till 'the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall,
which cometh suddenly in an instant.'


'But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or
bad, all belonged to the Royalists.

All? There are those who think that, if mere concettism be a part of
poetry, Quarles is as great a poet as Cowley or George Herbert,
Vaughan or Withers. On this question, and on the real worth of the
seventeenth century lyrists, a great deal has to be said hereafter.
Meanwhile, there are those, too, who believe John Bunyan, considered
simply as an artist, to be the greatest dramatic author whom England
has seen since Shakspeare; and there linger, too, in the libraries
and the ears of men, words of one John Milton. He was no rigid hater
of the beautiful, merely because it was heathen and Popish; no more,
indeed, were many highly-educated and highly-born gentlemen of the
Long Parliament: no more was Cromwell himself, whose delight was (if
we may trust that double renegade Waller) to talk over with him the
worthies of Rome and Greece, and who is said to have preserved for
the nation Raphael's cartoons and Andrea Mantegna's triumph when
Charles's pictures were sold. But Milton had steeped his whole soul
in romance. He had felt the beauty and glory of the chivalrous
Middle Age as deeply as Shakspeare himself: he had as much classical
lore as any Oxford pedant. He felt to his heart's core (for he sang
of it, and had he not felt it he would only have written of it) the
magnificence and worth of really high art, of the drama when it was