The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century--not too well regulated; stirred at once by the sinking force of the mediaeval and the rising force of the modern spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody, and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried in business--was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this disorderly abundance of dramatic creation--tragic, comic, and in all the varieties that _Hamlet_ catalogues or satirises.

The mid-nineteenth century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth.

It had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war, where the country had taken the most glorious part possible.

It also had a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form.
Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not monopolised the helm.

There was in society, though it was not strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of "good form." Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for "education" and ignorance of letters.