Note 290 — INTERCHAPTER IV.

These judgments might of course be reinforced enormously by extracts from letters and poems commendatory, as well as from substantive examples, of Elizabethan literature, prose or verse. But this is just one of the points in which the constantly increasing pressure of material makes abstinence, or at least rigid temperance, necessary as we come downwards. Some very notable passages in creative works—Shakespeare’s remarks on drama among the more, and Ben’s on “men’s and women’s poets” among the less—are glanced at elsewhere: Webster’s famous “catalogue déraisonné” (yet not wholly so) of his great companions, and his odd confession of inability to manage “the passionate and weighty nuntius,” tempts fuller notice. But one must refrain.