Well, we was talk an' talk, an' we h'ax w'at was bes' for do, an' we don' know. Phinée, 'e say dere's no good for 'ang de boy, an' dey be 'ang 'eem sure ef we tol'. An' 'e was good boy, too; 'e work 'ard; 'e never say nodding for de col'; 'e don' talk. So w'en we get down on Notre Dame du Désert, an' we fin' de Père Gendron was pass on de settlement for make 'es mis

sion, we tol' 'eem, an' we sen' 'eem de boy.

An' de nex' day w'en we h'ax de Père w'at 'e t'ink, 'e jus' say: "Poor littl' chil'! Poor chil'!" Den we h'ax 'eem w'at 'e do, an' 'e say: "Do? I'll jus' give 'eem slap on de side 'es 'ead, an' tol' 'eem for not do 'eem some more!"

An' p'r'aps dat was de bes'.

W

WHEN the rule limiting speeches to an hour was adopted by Congress, which was before most of you were born, an eminent but somewhat discursive person spent more than that measure of time in convincing me that whoever really had anything to say could say it in less. I then and there acquired a conviction of this truth, which has only strengthened with years. Yet whoever undertakes to lecture must adapt his discourse to the law which requires such exercises to be precisely sixty minutes long, just as a certain standard of inches must be reached by one who would enter the army. If one has been studying all his life how to be terse, how to suggest rather than to expound, how to contract rather than to dilate, something like a strain is put upon the conscience by this necessity of giving the full measure of words, without reference to other considerations which a judicious ear may esteem of more importance. Instead of saying things compactly and pithily, so that they may be easily carried away, one is tempted into a certain generosity and circumambience of phrase, which, if not adapted to conquer Time, may at least compel him to turn his glass and admit a drawn game. It is so much harder to fill an hour than to empty one!

These thoughts rose before me with pain ful vividness as I fancied myself standing

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 505.-8

here again, after an interval of thirtytwo years, to address an audience at the Lowell Institute. Then I lectured, not without some favorable acceptance, on Poetry in general and what constituted it, on Imagination and Fancy, on Wit and Humor, on Metrical Romances, on Ballads, and I know not what else-on whatever I thought I had anything to say about, I suppose. Then I was at the period in life when thoughts rose in coveys, and one filled one's bag without considering too nicely whether the game had been hatched within his neighbor's fence or within his own-a period of life when it doesn't seem as if everything had been said; when a man overestimates the value of what specially interests himself, and insists with Don Quixote that all the world shall stop till the superior charms of his Dulcinea of the moment have been acknowledged; when he conceives himself a missionary, and is persuaded that he is saving his fellows from the perdition of their souls if he convert them from belief in some aesthetic heresy. That is the mood of mind in which one may read lectures with some assurance of success. I remember how I read mine over to the clock, that I might be sure I had enough, and how patiently the clock listened, and gave no opinion except as to duration, on which point it assured me that I always ran over. This is the pleasant peril of en

thusiasm, which has always something of the careless superfluity of youth. Since then, and for a period making a sixth part of my mature life, my mind has been shunted off upon the track of other duties and other interests. If I have learned something, I have also forgotten a good deal. One is apt to forget so much in the service of one's country-even that he is an American, I have been told, though I can hardly believe it.

When I selected my topic for this new venture, I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever printed, in 1843, I think it was-it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years-was mainly about the Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude enough, but it was spontaneous and honest. I have continued to read them ever since, with no less pleasure, if with more discrimination. But when I was confronted with the question what I could say of them that would interest any rational person, after all that had been said by Lamb, the most sympathetic of critics, by Hazlitt, one of the most penetrative, by Coleridge, the most intuitive, and by so many others, I was inclined to believe that instead of an easy subject, I had chosen a subject very far from easy. But I sustained myself with the words of the great poet who so often has saved me from myself:

If I bring no other qualification, I bring at least that of hearty affection, which is the first condition of insight. I shall not scruple to repeat what may seem already too familiar, confident that these old poets will stand as much talk ing about as most people. At the risk of being tedious, I shall put you back to your scales as a teacher of music does his pupils. For it is the business of a lecturer to treat his audience as M. Jourdain wished to be treated in respect of the Latin language-to take it for granted that they know, but to talk to them as if they didn't. I should have preferred to entitle my course Readings from the Old English Dramatists with illustrative comments, rather than a critical discussion of them, for there is more conviction in what is beautiful in itself than in any amount of explanation why, or exposi

tion of how, it is beautiful. A rose has a very succinct way of explaining itself. When I find nothing profitable to say, I shall take sanctuary in my authors.

It is generally assumed that the Modern Drama in France, Spain, Italy, and England was an evolution out of the Mysteries and Moralities and Interludes which had edified and amused preceding generations of simpler taste and ruder intelligence. 'Tis the old story of Thespis and his cart. Taken with due limitations, and substituting the word stage for drama, this theory of origin is satisfactory enough. The stage was there, and the desire to be amused, when the drama at last appeared to occupy the one and to satisfy the other. It seems to have been, so far as the English Drama is concerned, a case of post hoc, without altogether adequate grounds for inferring a propter hoc. The Interludes may have served as training-schools for actors. It is certain that Richard Burbage, afterwards of Shakespeare's company, was so trained. He is the actor, you will remember, who first played the part of Hamlet, and the untimely expansion of whose person is supposed to account for the Queen's speech in the fencing scene, "He's fat and scant of breath." I may say, in passing, that the phrase merely means "He's out of training," as we should say now. A fat Hamlet is as inconceivable as a lean Falstaff. Shakespeare, with his usual discretion, never makes the Queen hateful, and made use of this expedient to show her solicitude for her son. Her last word, as she is dying, is his name.

To return. The Interlude may have kept alive the traditions of a stage, and may have made ready a certain number of persons to assume higher and graver parts when the opportunity should come; but the revival of learning, and the rise of cities capable of supplying a more cultivated and exacting audience, must have had a stronger and more direct influence on the growth of the Drama, as we understand the word, than any or all other influences combined. Certainly this seems to me true of the English Drama at least. The English Miracle Plays are dull beyond what is permitted even by the most hardened charity, and there is nothing dramatic in them except that they are in the form of dialogue. The Interludes are perhaps further saddened in the read

ing by reminding us how much easier it was to be amused three hundred years ago than now, but their wit is the wit of the Eocene period, unhappily as long as it is broad, and their humor is horseplay. We inherited a vast accumulation of barbarism from our Teutonic ancestors. It was only on those terms, perhaps, that we could have their vigor too. The Interludes have some small value as illustrating manners and forms of speech, but the man must be born expressly for the purpose-as for some of the adventures of medieval knight - errantry who can read them. Gammer Gurton's

Needle is perhaps as good as any. It was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566, and is remarkable, as Mr. Collier pointed out, as the first existing play acted before either university. Its author was John Still, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, and it is curious that when Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge he should have protested against the acting before the university of an English play so unbefitting its learning, dignity, and character. Gammer Gurton's Needle contains a very jolly and spirited song in praise of ale. Latin plays were acted before the universities on great occasions, but there was nothing dramatic about them but their form. One of them by Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, has been printed, and is not without merit. In the Pardoner and the Frère there is a hint at the drollery of those cross-readings with which Bonnel Thornton made our grandfathers laugh:

Pard. Pope July the Sixth hath granted fair and well

Fr. That when to them God hath abundance

the Song of Roland, or for its genuine humor, like Renard the Fox. There is even one French Miracle Play of the thirteenth century by the Trouvère Rutebeuf based on the legend of Theophilus of Antioch, which might be said to contain the germ of Calderon's El Magico Prodigioso, and thus remotely of Goethe's Faust. Of the next century is the farce of Pathelin, which has given a new word with its several derivatives to the French language, and a proverbial phrase, revenons à nos moutons, that long ago domiciled itself beyond the boundaries of France. Pathelin rises at times above the level of farce, though hardly to the region of pure comedy. I saw it acted at the Théâtre Français many years ago, with only so much modernization of language as was necessary to make it easily comprehensible, and found it far more than archæologically entertaining. Surely none of our old English Interludes could be put upon the stage now without the gloomiest results. They were not, in my judgment, the direct, and hardly even the collateral, ancestors of our legitimate comedy. On the other hand, while the Miracle Plays left no traces of themselves in our serious drama, the play of Punch and Judy looks very like an impoverished descendant of theirs.

In Spain it was otherwise. There the old Moralities and Mysteries of the Church Festivals are renewed and perpetuated in the Autos Sacramentales of Calderon, but ensouled with the creative breath of his genius, and having a strange phantasmal reality in the ideal world of his wonderworking imagination. One of his plays, La Devocion de la Cruz, an Auto in spirit if not in form, dramatizes, as only he could do it, the doctrine of justification by faith. In Spain, too, the comedy of the booth and the plaza is plainly the rude sketch of the higher creations of Tirso and Lope and Calderon and Rojas and Alarcon, and scores of others only less than they. The tragicomedy of Celestina, written at the close of the fifteenth century, is the first modern piece of realism or naturalism, as it is called, with which I am acquainted. It is coarse, and most of the characters are low, but there are touches of nature in it, and the character of Celestina is brought out with singular vivacity. The word tragicomedy is many years older than this play, if play that may be called which is but a

succession of dialogues, but I can think of no earlier example of its application to a production in dramatic form than by the Bachelor Fernando de Rojas in this instance. It was made over into English, rather than translated, in 1520-our first literary debt to Spain, I should guess. The Spanish theatre, though the influence of Seneca is apparent in the form it put on, is more sincerely a growth of the soil than any other of modern times, and it has one interesting analogy with our own in the introduction of the clown into tragedy, whether by way of foil or parody. The Spanish dramatists have been called marvels of fecundity, but the facility of their trochaic measure, in which the verses seem to go of themselves, makes their feats less wonderful. The marvel would seem to be rather that, writing so easily, they also wrote so well. Their invention is as remarkable as their abundance. Their drama and our own have affected the spirit and sometimes the substance of later literature more than any other. They have to a certain extent impregnated it. I have called the Spanish theatre a product of the soil, yet it must not be overlooked that Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had been translated into Spanish early in the sixteenth century, and that Lope de Rueda, its real founder, would willingly have followed classical models more closely had the public taste justified him in doing so. But fortunately the national genius triumphed over traditional criterions of art, and the Spanish theatre, asserting its own happier instincts, became and continued Spanish, with an unspeakable charm and flavor of its own.

One peculiarity of the Spanish plays makes it safe to recommend them even virginibus puerisque-they are never unclean. Even Milton would have approved a censorship of the press that accomplished this. It is a remarkable example of how sharp the contradiction is between the private morals of a people and their public code of morality. Certain things may be done, but they must not seem to be done.

I have said nothing of the earlier Italian Drama because it has failed to interest me. But Italy had indirectly a potent influence, through Spenser, in supplying English verse till it could answer the higher uses of the stage. The lines -for they can hardly be called verses

of the first attempts at regular plays are as uniform, flat, and void of variety as laths cut by machinery, and show only the arithmetical ability of their fashioners to count as high as ten. A speech is a series of such laths laid parallel to each other with scrupulous exactness. But I shall have occasion to return to this topic in speaking of Marlowe.

Who, then, were the Old English Dramatists? They were a score or so of literary bohemians, for the most part, living from hand to mouth in London during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century and the first thirty years of the seventeenth, of the personal history of most of whom we fortunately know little, and who, by their good luck in being born into an unsophisticated age, have written a few things so well that they seem to have written themselves. Poor, nearly all of them, they have left us a fine estate in the realm of Faery. Among them were three or four men of genius. A comrade of theirs by his calling, but set apart from them alike by the splendor of his endowments and the more equable balance of his temperament, was that divine apparition known to mortals as Shakespeare. The civil war put an end to their activity. The last of them, in the direct line, was James Shirley, remembered chiefly for two lines from the last stanza of a song of his in The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, which have become a proverb:

"Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

It is a nobly simple piece of verse, with the slow and solemn cadence of a funeral march. The hint of it seems to have been taken from a passage in that droningly dreary book the Mirror for Magistrates. This little poem is one of the best instances of the good fortune of the men of that age in the unconscious simplicity and gladness (I know not what else to call it) of their vocabulary. The language, so to speak, had just learned to go alone, and found a joy in its own mere motion, which it lost as it grew older, and to walk was no longer a marvel.

Nothing in the history of literature seems more startling than the sudden spring with which English poetry blossomed in the later years of Elizabeth's reign. We may account for the seemingly unheralded apparition of a single

genius like Dante or Chaucer by the genius itself; for, given that, everything else is possible. But even in such cases as these much must have gone before to make the genius available when it came. For the production of great literature there must be already a language ductile to all the varying moods of expression. There must be a certain amount of culture, or the stimulus of sympathy would be wanting. If, as Horace tells us, the heroes who lived before Agamemnon have perished for want of a poet to celebrate them, so doubtless many poets have gone dumb to their graves, or, at any rate, have uttered themselves imperfectly, for lack of a fitting vehicle or of an amiable atmosphere. Genius, to be sure, makes its own opportunity, but the circumstances must be there out of which it can be made. For instance, I cannot help feeling that Turold, or whoever was the author of the Chanson de Roland, was endowed with a rare epical faculty, and that he would have given more emphatic proof of it had it been possible for him to clothe his thought in a form equivalent to the vigor of his conception. Perhaps with more art, he might have had less of that happy audacity of the first leap which Montaigne valued so highly, but would he not have gained could he have spoken to us in a verse as sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as sweet in its cadences, as variously voluble by its slurs and elisions, and withal as sharply edged and clean cut as the Italian pentameter? It is at least a question open to debate. Mr. Matthew Arnold taxes the Song of Roland with an entire want of the grand style; and this is true enough; but it has immense stores of courage and victory in it, as Taillefer proved at the battle of Hastings --yes, and touches of heroic pathos, too. Many things had slowly and silently concurred to make that singular pre-eminence of the Elizabethan literature possible. First of all was the growth of a national consciousness, made aware of itself and more cumulatively operative by the existence and safer accessibility of a national capital, to serve it both as head and heart. The want of such a focus of intellectual, political, and material activity has had more to do with the backwardness and provincialism of our own literature than is generally taken into account. My friend Mr. Hosea Biglow

ventured to affirm twenty odd years ago that we had at last arrived at this national consciousness through the convulsion of our civil war-a convulsion so violent as might well convince the members that they formed part of a common body. But I make bold to doubt whether that consciousness will ever be more than fitful and imperfect, whether it will ever, except in some moment of supreme crisis, pour itself into and re-enforce the individual consciousness in a way to make our literature feel itself of age and its own master till we shall have got a common head as well as a common body. It is not the size of a city that gives it this stimulating and expanding quality, but the fact that it sums up in itself and gathers all the moral and intellectual forces of the country in a single focus. London is still the metropolis of the British as Paris of the French race. We admit this readily enough as regards Australia or Canada, but we willingly overlook it as regards ourselves. Washington is growing more national and more habitable every year, but it will never be a capital till every kind of culture is attainable there on as good terms as elsewhere.

Why not on better than elsewhere? We are rich enough. Bismarck's first care has been the Museums of Berlin. For a fiftieth part of the money Congress seems willing to waste in demoralizing the country, we might have had the Hamilton books and the far more precious Ashburnham manuscripts. Perhaps what formerly gave Boston its admitted literary supremacy was the fact that fifty years ago it was more truly a capital than any other American city. Edinburgh once held a similar position, with similar results. And yet how narrow Boston was! How scant a pasture it offered to the imagination! I have often mused on the dreary fate of the great painter who perished slowly of inanition over yonder in Cambridgeport, he who had known Coleridge and Lamb and Wordsworth, and who, if ever any,