The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_.

In a way their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too.

They used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built.
The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do.

It could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse.

The literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its destruction.