called The Jew and Ptolemy, having for its subject "the greediness of worldly choosers, and the bloody mind of usurers." Besides these, he speaks of "two prose books played at the Bell Savage," describing "how seditious estates with their own devices, false friends with their own swords, and rebellious commons with their own snares, are overthrown." From all these he admits that good moral lessons might be drawn, and so marks them out for exception from his attack. From his specifying two of them as "prose books," it is to be presumed that all the others were in verse.

The School of Abuse was taken in hand by Thomas Lodge, and in 1581 Gosson made a rejoinder in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions, where we have the following: "Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster made of brown paper; and at his return is so wonderfully changed, that he cannot be known but by some posy in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece of a cockleshell." Again, he refers to the mode of treating historical subjects, thus: "If a true history be taken in hand, it is made like our shadows, longest at the rising and falling of the sun, shortest of all at high noon. For the poets drive it most commonly unto such points as may best show the majesty of their pen in tragical speeches, or set the hearers agog with discourses of love, or paint a

few antics to fit their own humours with scoffs and taunts, or bring in a show to furnish the stage when it is bare: when the matter of itself comes short of this, they follow the practice of the cobbler and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out."

In another part of the same tract, he gives the following account of the sources whence dramatic writers commonly derived their plots and stories: "I may boldly say it, because I have seen it, that The Palace of Pleasure, The Golden Ass, the Ethiopian History, Amadis of France, and The Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked, to furnish the play-houses in London." This shows very clearly what direction the public taste was then taking; that the matter and method of the old dramas, and all "such musty fopperies of antiquity," would no longer go; and that there was an eager and pressing demand, not knowing exactly what to seek, nor how to come by it, for something wherein men might find, or at least fancy, themselves touched by the real vital currents of nature. And, as prescription was thus set aside, and art still ungrown, the materials of history and romance, foreign tales and plays, any thing that could furnish incidents and a plot, were blindly and ignorantly pressed into the service.

In the case of Gosson, some allowance may be due for the exaggerations of puritanical invective. But no such drawback can attach to the statements of

Sir Philip Sidney, whose Apology for Poetry, though not printed till 1595, must have been written before 1586, in which year the author died. On the subject of dramatic poetry, he has the following:

"Our tragedies and comedies are not without cause cried out against, observing neither rules of honest civility nor skilful poetry, excepting Gorboduc (again I say, of those that I have seen), which notwithstanding it is full of stately speeches and wellsounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca's style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy; yet, in truth, it is very defectious in the circumstances; which grieves me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies: for it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. . . .

"But, if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest, where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under kingdoms, that the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden: by and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place; then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave; while in the

mean time two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now, of time they are much more liberal: for ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love, after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours' space which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all examples justified.

"But, besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion; so as neither admiration and commiseration nor right sportfulness is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained."

From all these extracts it is evident enough that very little if any heed was then paid to the rules of dramatic propriety and decorum. It was not merely that the unities of time and place were set at nought, but that events and persons were thrown together without any order or law, bundled up as it were at random; unconnected with each other save to the senses, while at the same time according to sense they stood far asunder. It is also manifest that the principles of the Gothic Drama in respect

of general structure and composition, in disregard of the minor unities, and in the free blending and interchange of the comic and tragic elements where "the matter so carrieth it," were thoroughly established; though as yet those principles were not moulded up with sufficient art to shield them from the just censure and ridicule of sober judgment and good taste. Here was a great triumph to be achieved; greater, perhaps, than any art then known was sufficient for. Without this, any thing like an original or national Drama was impossible: all was bound to be mere mechanical repetition of what, elsewhere and in its day, had been a living thing. Sir Philip saw the chaos about him; but he did not see, and none could foresee, the creation that was to issue from it. He would have spoken very differently, no doubt, had he lived to see the intrinsic relations of character and passion, the vital sequence of mental and moral development, set forth in such clearness and strength, the whole fabric resting on such solid grounds of philosophy, and charged with such cunning efficacies of poetry, that breaches of local or temporal succession either pass without notice, or are noticed only for the gain of truth and nature that is made through them. For the laws of sense hold only as the thoughts are absorbed in what is sensuous and definite; and the very point was, to lift the mind above this by working on its imaginative forces, and penetrating it with the light of relations more inward and essential.