pleasant peril of enthusiasm, 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: 66 Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore, Che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume." 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 talking 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 did n'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 exposition 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 reading 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 horse-play. 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 mediæval 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 Frere" there is a hint at the drollery of those cross-readings with which Bonnell Thornton made our grandfathers laugh: "Pard. Pope July the Sixth hath granted fair and well- Everything in these old farces is rudimentary. They are not merely coarse; they are vulgar. In France it was better, but France had something which may fairly be called literature before any other country in Europe, not literature in the highest sense, of course, but something, at any rate, that may be still read with pleasure for its delicate beauty, like "Aucassin and Nicolete," or for its downright vigor, like 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 "Patelin," 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. "Patelin" 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 |