From all which it is evident enough that very little if any heed was then paid to dramatic propriety and decorum.  It was not merely that the unities of place and time were set at nought, but that events and persons were thrown together without any order or law; unconnected with each other save to the senses, while at the same time according to sense they were far asunder.  It is also manifest that the principles of the Gothic Drama in respect of general structure and composition, in disregard of the minor unities, and in the free blending and interchange of the comic and tragic elements, were thoroughly established; though not yet moulded up with sufficient art to shield them from the just censure and ridicule of sober judgment and good taste.  Here was a great work to be done; greater than any art then known was sufficient for.  Without this, any thing like an original or national drama was impossible.  Sir Philip saw the chaos about him; but he did not see, and none could foresee, the creation that was to issue from it.  He would have spoken very differently, no doubt, had he lived to see the intrinsic relations of character and passion, the vital sequence of mental and moral development, set forth in such clearness and strength, the whole fabric resting on such solid grounds, of philosophy, and charged with such cunning efficacies of poetry, that breaches of local and chronological succession either pass without notice, or are noticed only for the gain of truth and nature that is made through them.  For the laws of sense hold only as the thoughts are absorbed in what is sensuous and definite; and the very point was, to lift the mind above this by working on its imaginative forces, and penetrating it with the light of relations more inward and essential.

At all events, it was by going ahead, and not by retreating, that modern thought was to find its proper dramatic expression.  The foundation of principles was settled, and stood ready to be built upon whenever the right workman should come.  Moreover public taste was sharp for something warm with life, so much so indeed as to keep running hither and thither after the shabbiest semblances of it, but still unable to rest with them.  The national mind, in discarding, or rather outgrowing the older species of drama, had worked itself into contact with Nature.  And it was the uncritical, popular, living, practical mind that was to give the law in this business:  nothing was to be achieved either by the word or the work of those learned folk who would not be pleased unless they could parse their pleasure by the rules of ancient grammar.  But to reproduce nature in mental forms requires great power of art, much greater, perhaps, than minds educated amidst works of art can well conceive.