blood in his veins.  Lamb had the Elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave.  Swinburne had none of this rich taste in speech.  He used words riotously, but he did not use great words riotously.  He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was carefully extravagant.  He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a beautiful noise.  Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to Lamb and the Elizabethans.  He differed fundamentally from them in his attitude to the spectacle of life.  His mood was the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist.  He lectured his generation on the deadly virtues.  He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour.  Lamb himself was little enough of a formal Puritan.  He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of the Puritans.  He did not scold, however, but retired into the spectacle of another century.  He wandered among old plays like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.  Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for saying things.  As a result, a great deal of his verse—­and still more of his prose—­has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.

His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most argumentative.  Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion.  His style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for intimate conversation.  He writes in superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is being fairly sensible.  His criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is.  His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading.  He out-Lambs Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious excess when he says of Brome: 

    Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in
    their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as
    Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.

Brome, I think, is better than this implies.  Swinburne is not going many miles too far when he calls The Antipodes “one of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the world.”  It is a piece of poetic low comedy that will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it expecting to be bored.

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed in them.  He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale.  Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate plays.  Of most of them it may be said that their age is greater than they—­that they are glorified by their period rather than glorify it.  They are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble circumstances.