and the abundance of their labours only showed that even the “toothless” satires of Hall could bite more sharply than those of servile imitators.  After Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” was published, the press overflowed with many mistaken imitations, in which fairies were the chief actors—­this circumstance is humorously animadverted on by Marston, in his satires, as quoted by Warton:  every scribe now falls asleep, and in his

    ——­dreams, straight tenne pound to one
    Outsteps some fairy——­
    Awakes, straiet rubs his eyes, and PRINTS HIS TALE.

The great personage who gave a fashion to this class of literature was the courtly and romantic Elizabeth herself; her obsequious wits and courtiers would not fail to feed and flatter her taste.  Whether they all felt the beauties, or languished over the tediousness of “The Faerie Queen,” and the “Arcadia” of Sidney, at least her majesty gave a vogue to such sentimental and refined romance.  The classical Elizabeth introduced another literary fashion; having translated the Hercules Oetacus, she made it fashionable to translate Greek tragedies.  There was a time, in the age of fanaticism, and the Long Parliament, that books were considered the more valuable for their length.  The seventeenth century was the age of folios.  Caryl wrote a “Commentary on Job” in two volumes folio, of above one thousand two hundred sheets! as it was intended to inculcate the virtue of patience, these volumes gave at once the theory and the practice.  One is astonished at the multitude of the divines of this age; whose works now lie buried under the brick and mortar tombs of four or five folios, which, on a moderate calculation, might now be “wire-woven” into thirty or forty modern octavos.

In Charles I.’s time, love and honour were heightened by the wits into florid romance; but Lord Goring turned all into ridicule; and he was followed by the Duke of Buckingham, whose happy vein of ridicule was favoured by Charles II., who gave it the vogue it obtained.

Sir William Temple justly observes, that changes in veins of wit are like those of habits, or other modes.  On the return of Charles II., none were more out of fashion among the new courtiers than the old Earl of Norwich, who was esteemed the greatest wit, in his father’s time, among the old.

Modern times have abounded with what may be called fashionable literature.  Tragedies were some years ago as fashionable as comedies are at this day;[29] Thomson, Mallet, Francis, Hill, applied their genius to a department in which they lost it all.  Declamation and rant, and over-refined language, were preferred to the fable, the manners, and to nature—­and these now sleep on our shelves!  Then too we had a family of paupers in the parish of poetry, in “Imitations of Spenser.”  Not many years ago, Churchill was the occasion of deluging the town with political poems in quarto.—­These again were succeeded by narrative poems, in the ballad measure, from all sizes of poets.—­The Castle of Otranto was the father of that marvellous, which once over-stocked the circulating library and closed with Mrs. Radcliffe.—­Lord Byron has been the father of hundreds of graceless sons!—­Travels and voyages have long been a class of literature so fashionable, that we begin to prepare for, or to dread, the arrival of certain persons from the Continent!