It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser’s influence found its pleasantest outlet.  One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on either of the Fletchers.  There is no reason why any modern should not read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the sweetness and contentment of the countryside, that “merry England” which was the background of all sectarian and intellectual strife and labour, finds as in a placid stream a calm reflection and picture of itself.  The seventeenth century gave birth to many things that only came to maturity in the nineteenth; if you care for that kind of literary study which searches out origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, you will find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single thing the early work of Keats.  Browne has another claim to immortality; if it be true as is now thought that he was the author of the epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke: 

“Underneath this sable hearse
 Lies the subject of all verse,
 Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother. 
 Death, ere thou hast slain another
 Fair and learned and good as she,
 Time shall throw a dart at thee.”

then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the spirit of the English Renaissance.  For the breath of it stirs in these slow quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words implicate the soul of a period.

By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of Spenser and the school which worked under it had died out.  Its place was taken by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne.  Jonson’s poetic method is something like his dramatic; he formed himself as exactly as possible on classical models.  Horace had written satires and elegies, and epistles and complimentary verses, and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately followed where Horace led.  He wrote elegies on the great, letters and courtly compliments and love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air of general censure.  But though he was classical, his style was never latinized.  In all of them he strove to pour into an ancient form language that was as intense and vigorous and as purely English as the earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished.  The result is not entirely successful.  He seldom fails to reproduce classic dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom succeeds in achieving classic grace and ease.  Occasionally, as in his best known lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of marvellous, when we know that his images and even his words in the song are all plagiarized from other men.  His expression is always clear and vigorous and his sense good and noble.  The native earnestness and sincerity of the man shines through as it does in his dramas and his prose.  In an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy—­eulogy so amazing in its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much that it should have been written as