In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of "humours" (which found the most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays[198]), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name into the Restoration age[199] and cannot be said to have ever died out. In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist's labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible _verve_ of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic versatility of Shirley--not to mention many later and not necessarily minor names[200]--mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness and correctness--the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the representation of the living realities of life--but in a lightness not incompatible with sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment resulting from accumulated experience, enabled them to advance from success to success. Thus the comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the _interregnum_ of the Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes assumed with later growths of English comedy.