whole or in part; with Webster he produced "Westward Hoe" and "Northward Hoe," and assisted Middleton in "The Roaring Girl." Dekker is also the author of several satirical tracts; e.g., "News from Hell," and "The Guls Hornbook," which throw great light on the manners of the age.

Thomas Heywood, a most prolific writer, is the author of one very famous play, "A Woman Killed with Kindnesse (1617). The story closely resembles that of Kotzebue's play of "The Stranger:" an unfaithful wife, overcome by the inexhaustible goodness of her injured but forgiving husband, droops and expires in the rush of contending emotions-shame, remorse, penitence, and gratitude which distract her soul. Thomas Middleton wrote, in whole or in part, a large number of plays; Mr. Dyce's edition of his works comprises twenty-two dramas and eleven masques. Of these "The Familie of Love" and "The Witch" (from which Shakspeare may have derived a suggestion or two for the witches in "Macbeth") have been singled out for praise. William Rowley seems to have preferred writing acts in other men's plays to inventing or adapting plots for himself; thus we find him taking part in "The Old Law" with Massinger and Middleton, and in “ The Spanish Gipsie" with Middleton. There is much powerful writing in Cyril Tourneur's tragedy of "The Atheist's Revenge."

When we look into the private life of these Elizabethan dramatists, we too often find it a wild scene of irregular activity and unbridled passion, of improvidence and embarrassment, of fits of diligence alternating with the saturnalia of a loose and reckless gayety, of unavailing regrets cut short by early death. Yet we must not judge them harshly, for they fell upon an age of transition and revolution. The ancient church,

environed as it was with awe and mystery, spreading into unknown depths and distances in time and space, which might be resisted, but could not be despised, had passed from the land like a dream; and the new institution which the will of the nation had substituted for it, whatever might be its merits, could not as yet curb the pride, nor calm the passions, nor dazzle the imagination, of England's turbulent and gifted youth. True, Catholicism, in disappearing, had left solid moral traditions behind it, which the better English mind, naturally serious and conscientious, faithfully adhered to and even developed; but the playwrights and wits, or at any rate the great majority of them, plunged in the immunities and irregularities of a great city, and weak with the ductile temperament of the artist, were generally outside the sphere of these traditions.

The last of this race of dramatists was James Shirley. His first play, "Love Tricks," appeared in 1625; and scarcely a year passed between that date and 1642 in which he did not bring a new drama upon the stage. In November, 1642, the Long Parliament passed a resolution by which, in consideration of the disturbed state of the country, the London theatres were closed. Out of the thirty dramas comprised in Mr. Dyce's edition, six are tragedies, four tragi-comedies, and twenty comedies. The plots of more than half of these are of Italian or Spanish origin; most of the rest are drawn from contemporary English life. "In the greater part of Shirley's dramas," says Mr. Hallam, "we find the favorite style of that age, the characters foreign and of elevated rank, the interest serious but not always of buskined dignity, the catastrophe fortunate; all, in short, that has gone under the vague appellation of tragi-comedy." It must be admitted in Shirley's favor, that though his incidents are often coarse, and his dia

logue licentious, his poetical justice is most often soundly administered; in the end, vice suffers and virtue is rewarded. He was burnt out in the great fire of 1666; and the discomfort and distress thus brought upon him are said to have caused his death. Besides his regular dramas, Shirley is the author of several moral plays, masques, and short plays for exhibition in private houses or schools. At the end of a performance of this kind, which seems to have been the last dramatic piece he ever wrote, "The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses," occurs the noble choral ode beginning "The glories of our blood and state," which is printed in Percy's "Reliques," and many other collections.1

The invectives of the Puritans against theatrical entertainments during all this period became ever louder and more vehement, creating by their extravagance a counter license and recklessness in the dramatists, and again justified in their turn, or partly so, by their excesses. At last, in 1643, after the civil war had broken out, the Puritan party became the masters of the situation, and the theatres were closed. This date brings us down some way into the succeeding period.

Prose Writing: Novels, Essays, Criticism.

The prose literature of this period is not less abundant and various than the poetry. We meet now with novelists, pamphleteers, and essayists for the first time. Lodge wrote several novels, from one of which, "Rosalind," Shakspeare took the plot of "As You Like it." Lyly published his "Euphues" in 1578; and the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney appeared after the

1 Chief plays of Shirley: "The Maid's Revenge," "The Politician," The Cardinal," tragedies; "The Ball," "The Gamester," “The Bird in a Cage" (which has an ironical dedication to William Prynne), "The Lady of Pleasure," comedies.

author's death in 1590. This tedious pastoral romance is the fruit of the revival of letters, and of the influence of Italian literature. It was evidently suggested by the "Arcadia" of Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan poet, who died in the year 1530. Now, too, the literature of travel and adventure, which began with old Sir John Maundevile, and has attained to such vast proportions among us in modern times, was placed on a broad and solid pedestal of recorded fact by the work of Richard Hakluyt, a Herefordshire man, who in 1589 published a collection of voyages made by Englishmen "at any time" (as he states on the titlepage) "within the compass of these fifteen hundred years." Purchas' Pilgrimage," of which the third edition is dated 1617, will occur to many as the book in which Coleridge had been reading before he dreamt the dream of "Kubla Khan." Samuel Purchas was the clergyman of St. Martin's, Ludgate, and a stanch upholder of Episcopacy. In the epistle dedicatory, addressed to Archbishop Bancroft, after saying that he had consulted above twelve hundred authors in the composition of the work, and explaining what those would find in it who sought for information simply, he proceeds, "Others may hence learn . . . two lessons fitting these times, the unnaturalness of faction and atheism; that law of nature having written in the practice of all men the profession of some religion, and in that religion, wheresoever any society of priests or religious persons are or have been in the world, no admittance of Parite; the angels in heaven, divels in hell (as the royallest of fathers, the father of our country, hath pronounced), and all religions on earth, as here we show, being equally subject to inequality, that is, to the equitie of subordinate order. And, if I live to finish the rest, I hope to show the Paganism of anti-chris

tian Popery," &c. Without being a follower of M. Comte, one may be of opinion that the mental condition of those who could carry on, or assent to the carrying on, of anthropological researches in the temper of mind avowed by honest Purchas, needed a large infusion of the esprit positif.1

The genius of Montaigne raised up English imitators of his famous work, one of whom was afterwards to eclipse his original. Francis Bacon published a small volume entitled "Essayes, Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion and Disswasion," in 1597. These were again published, with large additions, in 1612; and again, similarly augmented, in 1625, under the title of "Essayes, or Counsels Civill and Moral." 2 In the dedication to this edition, Lord Bacon writes, "I do now publish my "Essayes," which of all my other workes have beene most currant; for that, as it seemes, they come home to men's businesse and bossomes. I have enlarged them both in number and weight, so that they are indeed a new work." The "Essays," in this their final shape, were immediately translated into French, Italian, and Latin.

At the end of the present period, an Oxford student, fond of solitude and the learned dust of great libraries, produced a strange, multifarious book, which he called. "The Anatomy of Melancholy." Robert Burton lived for some thirty years in his rooms at Christ Church,

1 The full title of this curious old book is, "Purchas, his Pilgrimage, or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation unto this Present. In four parts. This First contayneth a Theological and Geographical History of Asia, Africa, and America, with the islands adjacent." Besides, the religions, ancient and modern (which, he says, are his principal aim), he undertakes to describe the chief rarities and wonders of nature and art in all the countries treated of.

2 See p. 513.