fore, from the debated question of good or bad taste in filling the stage with violent action, it is clear that this was not possible for the classical dramatist, whereas it was possible for the English dramatist. Now Sackville, in our first English tragedy, did not fully avail himself of the possibilities of the modern stage. The war between Porrex and Ferrex, the murder of Porrex by Videna, the storming of the palace and the massacre of old Gorboduc by the rabble, were narrated, not represented, as they would have been by the later Elizabethan actors. It is, however, worthy of notice, that he did to some extent avail himself of the modern possibilities in the "dumb show" before the Acts. "The order and signification of the dumb show before the Fifth Act," is set down as follows: "First the drums and flutes began to sound, during which there came forth upon the stage a company of harquebushers and of armed men, all in order of battle. These after their pieces discharged, and that the armed men had three times marched about the stage, departed, and then the drums and flutes did cease. Hereby was signified tumults, rebellions, arms, and civil wars to follow, &c." There we have a certain anticipation of the "excursions" and hand-to-hand fighting afterwards incorporated with the play. Although, therefore, we may not call Sackville the "founder," we may very well call him the "pioneer," of English tragedy, as well as of our grand epic.

VII.-RICHARD EDWARDS (1523-1566): Damon and Pythias— Paradise of Dainty Devices.

About the time of the first representation of "Gorboduc," was presented also for the entertainment of her Majesty the comedy of "Damon and Pythias," which is in some respects of a higher order than the imitations of Plautus and Terence, composed for the boys of Eton or the undergraduates of the Universities. The author was Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, a poet and a musician, formerly a student of Christ Church, Oxford : and he would seem to have kept in mind in whose presence his play was to be acted. It is to be presumed, from bloodthirsty Mary's preference for Heywood and Udall, that she enjoyed a hearty laugh for its own sake; but her successor, if we may judge from her warm commendations of "Damon and Pythias," though not averse to comic scenes of a broad character, desired to encourage a more decorous order of play with some pretence to gravity, wisdom, and refined sentiment-an easy, pleasant, witty play, enforcing a lofty sentiment and a lesson of state, such as she and her statesmen might listen to with pleasure, and without incurring the charge of frivolity. At any rate this was the kind of

play that Edwards furnished and that her Majesty commended. It is a praise of true friendship and an exposure of false friendship, ending with the moral that

"The strongest guard that kings can have

Are constant friends their state to save

and a prayer that God grant such friends to Queen Elizabeth. Edwards goes to classical story for a pair of noble friends, Damon and Pythias, and exhibits them at the Court of the tyrant Dionysius the younger in glaring contrast to two false friends, two men who pretend friendship from interested motives-Aristippus, the worldÎy-wise philosopher, a type of an urbane courtier, and Carisophus, a vile type of spy and informer. The devotion of the two faithful friends is fiercely tried and nobly maintained, while the other partnership is dissolved the moment it ceases to be useful to one of the parties. A good deal of amusing action and witty dialogue is got out of the relations of Aristippus and Carisophus to the Court and to each other: and a passage of more boisterous entertainment is rather forcibly provided by introducing Grim, a collier of Croydon, as purveyor of coals to Dionysius.

Edwards starts in his prologue with very sound principles for the composition of comedy :

-

"In Comedies the greatest skill is this, rightly to touch
All things to the quick, and eke to frame each person so,
That by his common talk you may his nature rightly know:
A Roister ought not to preach, that were too strange to hear,
But as from virtue he doth swerve, so ought his words appear:

The old man is sober, the young man rash, the Lover triumphing in joys,
The Matron grave, the Harlot wild and full of wanton toys.
Which as in one course all they no wise do agree:

So correspondent to their kind their speeches ought to be."

And it must be owned that he fulfils these conditions with no small success. He is not particular to realise the political or religious talk that may be supposed to have taken place at the Court of Syracuse, but he makes the most of the common hints of the character of Dionysius, and develops Aristippus with considerable spirit from the famous line of Horace—

"Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res.

One very striking passage in the play is that where Damon quotes the description of Ulysses in Horace's version of the opening lines of the Odyssey as the description of "a perfect wise man "-qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes-one who had seen cities and the manners of many different men. This ideal is significant of the coming excellence of English

drama; and there are not wanting other evidences that observation of character was then quite a mania among literary men.

Edwards was the author also of a play on "Palamon and Arcite," which has not been preserved. We have, however, another monument of his poetical taste and talent in the 'Paradise of Dainty Devices,' a miscellany of amatory and moral pieces, similar to Tottel's Miscellany. It was not published till 1576, ten years after the death of its editor. It ran through several editions before the end of the century. This paradise was described by a critic of the period as 66 a packet of bald rhymes"; and the description could not easily be improved. It is lugubrious and barren of genius to a degree. All the contributors write in the same doleful strain. As a whole, it gives an impression of dismal monotony; and when we put together the productions of the several writers, we find them one and all in doleful dumps. Edwards laments the prevalence of flattery, the subtle sleights practised at Court, the slow fulfilment of promises, the general want of truth, the rapid decay of worldly beauties, the delay of his desires, the cruel power of Fortune. He denounces the frauds that beguile simple honesty :

"I see the serpent vile, that lurks under the green,

How subtilly he shrouds himself that he may not be seen:
And yet his foster'd bane his leering looks bewray.

Wo worth the wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay!

Wo worth the feigning looks on favour that do wait!

Wo worth the feigned friendly heart that harbours deep deceit !
Wo worth the viper's brood! O thrice wo worth I say

All worldly wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay !”

His coadjutors are equally miserable and indignant against wrongdoing. W. Hunnis is eloquent in lover's melancholy: he repents the folly of misplaced affection and misspent youth: he compares himself to a dove on a leafless branch weeping and wailing and tearing its breast: finding no joy in life he desires death. He is no less unhappy in his notions of friendship. Thomas, Lord Vaux, several of whose pieces had appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, is also a sorrowful singer: and Jasper Heywood, Francis Kinwelmarsh, Sands, F. M., and Richard Hill, are all laid under contribution for poems of a grave or lugubrious cast. The liveliest of the company is Edward, Earl of Oxford. He also, indeed, bewails the loss of his good name, and cries for help to gods, saints, sprites, powers, and howling hounds of hell; writes of rejected loves and unattained desires, of trickling tears and irremediable pensiveness. But his wounds are obviously shallow. The sprightly verses on a reply given by Desire have more of his heart in them :

"The lively lark did stretch her wing
The messenger of morning bright:
And with her cheerful voice did sing
The day's approach, discharging night,
When that Aurora blushing red
Descried the guilt of Thetis' bed.
Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight.

I went abroad to take the air,
And in the meads I met a knight,
Clad in carnation colour fair.
I did salute the youthful wight;
Of him his name I did inquire;
He sighed and said, I am Desire.
Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight.
Desire I did desire to stay,

Awhile with him I craved talk:
The courteous wight said me no nay,
But hand in hand with me did walk.
Then in desire I asked again

What thing did please and what did pain.
Laradon tan tan.

He smiled and thus he answered me:
Desire can have no greater pain,
Than for to see another man

The thing desired to obtain.
No joy no greater too than this
Than to enjoy what others miss.
Laradon tan tan."

VIII. GEORGE GASCOIGNE (1525-1577).

Within the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign another novelty was added to the drama. In 1566, George Gascoigne translated from Ariosto, for representation at Gray's Inn, the prose comedy Gli-Suppositi. This, acted under the title of "The Supposes," is the first comedy written in English prose, and in plot, situation, and character, it approaches nearer than "Damon and Pythias" to the established type of English comedy. One great tribute to its excellence is the use made of its plot and its situations by Shakespeare: the underplot in the "Taming of the Shrew" is an adaptation of the plot of "The Supposes," and a great many of the situations or relations between the various characters might be paralleled from Shakespeare's comedies.

George Gascoigne, "soldier and poet" as he loved to describe himself, was the most versatile writer belonging to the first half of Elizabeth's reign; and contrived to anticipate more than one of the forms of composition in which the later Elizabethans achieved their fame. Few writers can claim a more varied list of

брешен

literary exploits. Besides his prose comedy, he translated from the Italian of Bandello the prose tale of "Jeronimi," perhaps the first novel printed in English: wrote the mock-heroic poem of "Dan Bartholomew," our first attempt to rival the mock-heroic poetry of the Italians: wrote three acts of "Jocasta," the first adaptation of a Greek tragedy performed on the English stage: prepared masques for Queen Elizabeth: composed in prose a dull “tragical comedy ""The Glass of Government": and wrote the "Steel Glass," the first extensive English satire.

His personal history is not without interest. It affords a touching example of middle-age rendered miserable by thoughtless youth. When he went up from Cambridge to the Inns of Court, a vigorous, enthusiastic young fellow, "well-born, tenderly fostered, and delicately accompanied," he was ready to join friends and companions in any excitement, animal or intellectual. One of his earliest adventures in London was a temporary imprisonment during the year 1548, on a charge of dicing and other disreputable practices. Entering into the fashion of the time, he wrote love-verses whose coarse boisterous humour was warmly resented by the graver sort when first they appeared in print. Aspiring to political distinction, he sat as a burgess for Bedford during the reign of Mary. When play-writing became the rage, he at once figured in the front of play-wrights. Before this, having impaired his estate by his extravagance, and being disinherited as a prodigal son, he had sought to retrieve his fortunes by marrying a rich widow; but either the money was tied up from him for behoof of the lady's children by her former husband, or he got it into his hands and ran through it before 1572, for at that date he endeavoured to gain admission into Parliament as burgess for Midhurst, and was defeated by formal objections, which represented him as being a slanderous rhymer, a notorious ruffian, an atheist, a manslaughterer, and an extensive debtor lurking about in fear of apprehension, and seeking admission to Parliament that he might be able to defy his creditors. It may have been this last ignoble motive, if not the motive of retrieving his name by brave achievements, that induced him to cross over to Holland and seek a commission under the Prince of Orange. After his return from Holland in 1573, he made shift to live by his pen. He was now well on to fifty, harassed by debt, met on all sides with cold looks, bitterly regretful of the mad follies of his youth. During his absence, some of his questionable poesies had been printed, and were read with indignation by the guardians of public morality. Soon after his return, in 1575, he issued an edition of his works under the title of 'Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds.' In a prefatory epistle to "reverend divines," he apologises humbly but with some bitterness for the faults of his youth;