The Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur Author:Cyril Tourneur Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. JHAT Shakespeare was but the sun of a mighty system, and had necessarily eclipsed in his meridian splendour the glories of his satellites, ... more »was idly conjectured by the acutest critic of the eighteenth century, and has been exactly verified by the conscientious industry of our own. The unerring" taste and nice discernment of Lamb, the searching and comprehensive criticism of Coleridge, the im- . petuous enthusiasm and analytical subtlety of Hazlitt, were fortunately directed to the noble task of remembering their forgotten countrymen, of recognising and resuscitating buried merit, and of doing justice where justice had been so long and so shamefully deferred. When such illustrious leaders undertake and consecrate a cause, they are not likely to want followers ; though it too often happens that the follower succeeds to the cheap heritage of the enthusiasm without succeeding to any share in the discernment of his masters. The keen and cultured discrimination of a Lamb can sift the treasure it discovers; but to the omnivorous voracity of the Dibdens and Shakespeare Societies indirectly called into being by him, all is equally facceptable and all equally valuable. Criticism dies, and Bibliography, its bastard child, is born: fruitful investigation ends, and a barren mania begins. During the last fifty years no department of our literature has been so exhaustively and inde- fatigably studied as the Elizabethan drama. Its very refuse and rinsings have been hailed with a superstitious reverence ridiculous in its excess and grotesque in its expression. There is scarcely a name among the innumerable dramatists who thronged the English stage from 1562 to 1640, which is not now more familiar to a large body of modern students than any of the masters of the eighte...« less