young. In the same house with the giraffes is an animal that more than divides with them the attention and curiosity of visitors; this is the female ourang-outan, which, as the Society's Report for the present year informs us, has now lived nearly three years and a half in the Gardens, or nearly twice as long as any individual of the species was ever known to live in Europe before. Lady Jane, as she is here called, is altogether of a higher grade than her kindred of the monkey tribe. She does not condescend much to gambols; but ask her to do anything sensible, as, for instance, to sit down and take a comfortable cup of tea, and she will do it with the most amusing gravity and precision. But teadrinking with her is altogether a solemn and ceremonious, albeit daily, proceeding; so she first submits herself to her keeper, to have a befitting dress for the occasion put on, and then places her table, lays the cloth, sits down, and sips the tea from the cup and saucer, holding a kind of conversation with the keeper at the same time. The peculiar low noise with which she intimates her assent to his notions, when she approves of them, is more than entertaining; it really seems to suggest so much of what she would say, had not speech been denied. The affectionateness of her disposition is very touching. As the keeper leans over her, she will put up her long arm, and clasp him round the neck, as though she really felt all his attentions and kindness. We have yet much to learn as to the true mental powers and characteristics of such animals, and as to their relation with our own. It will be seen from the foregoing account, that the available funds of the Society must have been of no ordinary amount. From the financial accounts now before us, it appears that the expenditure on the Gardens from 1825, the year of commencement, up to the end of 1840, was in general terms 188,000l. This immense sum has been derived chiefly from two sources, in very nearly equal pro portions, namely, the payments of the members or fellows (each 5. for admission and 37. annually), and the shilling admission fees of visitors. In the year 1842, the receipts from the former source have been 4542l. 13s., and from the latter, 40211. 13s. The number of fellows, and fellows elect, at the present time, is 2478, or 412 less than 1839. The falling off in this respect is attributed, no doubt correctly, to the retirement of such of the earlier members as cared simply for the place as a fashionable Sunday lounge, and the similar decline in the number of visitors, to those casual influences, which all exhibitions are liable to. The removal of the Museum to the Gardens, the erection of the new Carnivora Terrace, and the proposed addition of an excellent military band, will no doubt do much to remedy both these causes of decline. But at all events, the Society can now rely upon a certain amount of permanent support, which we are happy to say is amply sufficient to keep these beautiful and interesting Gardens in all their present reputation and value. SCARCELY less surprising than the greatness of the drama of the Elizabethan era, is the suddenness of its growth, and the extraordinary contrast presented by it to all that had gone before: growth, indeed, seems hardly a fitting word to characterise so instantaneous and important and complete a change. Up to the year 1580, and probably a little later, not a single dramatic writer or a single dramatic piece had appeared, the names of which now excite any interest beyond. that of their position as links between the old moral plays and the modern drama; fifteen years clapse, and behold!-Munday, Chettle, Kyd, Lodge, Greene, Lyly, Nash, and Peele, are familiar names; Marlowe has written Tamburlaine,' 'Dr. Faustus,' The Jew of Malta,' and 'Edward II.;' above all, Shakspere has given to the world nearly one half of his entire works. The fact is established, in the opinion of the writer of this article, in the recent pictorial edition of his works, that Shakspere, instead of being, as we have hitherto generally supposed, a follower in point of time of the Peeles and Greenes and Marlowes, and therefore deriving no inconsiderable advantage from their works and example, was really strictly contemporary with them. It has been shown in the work referred to, that whilst we know of the existence, in 1598, of at least sixteen of Shakspere's plays, some of these, of high excellence, must have been produced considerably before 1591, when Spenser, in the Tears of the Muses,' laments the temporary withdrawal of some one who had "the comic stage, and describes the writer thus unmistakeably, as VOL. V. T "the man whom Nature self had made Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late," &c. Lastly, it is now known, through Mr. Collier's researches, that Shakspere, so early as 1589, was a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, with a fourth of the other sharers below him on the proprietors' list. Now there is nothing in Shakspere's subsequent career as an actor to lead us to suppose he could have obtained such a position as this at the age of twenty-five from the exercise of his talents that way; yet look at him as a writer, and the matter is at once explained. But then there is that odd idea of the older commentators, that every body rather than he began to write early. Few persons would suppose, from merely reading their speculations, that whilst the three writers we have mentioned were all about Shakspere's own age, the greatest of them, Marlowe, is supposed to have been a year younger;* and secondly, that after all, there is every reason to suppose they had done very little at the period when it is all but certain that Shakspere had done much: by 1589 Marlowe had written Tamburlaine the Great,' and probably the Massacre of Paris,' and Peele and Greene may have each produced one or two pieces for the stage, as they are supposed to have connected themselves with it a year or two before; but this is pretty well all that can be said for the precedence of these early contemporaries of Shakspere, and proves, in connexion with what has been previously advanced, to our mind, something very like the reverse. On the whole, then, it will be seen that Dryden knew perfectly well what he was about when he said, Shakspere "created the stage among us." Up to the period we have referred to, 1595, it was still, however, but the basis of the wonderful structure of the English national drama that had been laid; for the completion of the work we must look a few years further on,—to a time when Shakspere had closed his career, and when a host of other writers had arisen, imbued generally, though of course in a lower degree, with the same lofty spirit, and kindred talents. Many of these, indeed, for their own permanent popularity had better have appeared at any other time: a Shakspere only could have overshadowed them. Considering how little these writers are now generally read in comparison with their extraordinary excellence, one cannot but remark how dif ferent would be the fate of almost any one of them, could his lot have been cast in the nineteenth instead of the seventeenth century. What should not we think of a Ben Jonson, or a pair of Beaumonts and Fletchers, or a Massinger now? What might not be the effect of their writings on the present fortunes of the national theatres? Yet even these are but removed by the faintest possible lines of demarcation of rank from Ford, whom Lamb calls of " the first order of poets;' or Webster, with that "wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy'" of which the same critic speaks; or George Chapman, with his "full heightened style," as his brother poet Webster calls it; or Heywood, the "prose Shakspere;" or Dekker, or Rowley, or Middleton, or Daniel, or Shirley,-but there is no end to the list, and it is almost as idle to attempt now to familiarise them separately to the public, as to point out the stars of the milky way. Let us now turn our attention to an instructive com * He was born, according to Malone, in 1565. mentary upon all this amazing variety and height of intellectual power, the state of the theatres in London in which that power was exhibited. Although the earliest public Theatres seem to have been established during the continuance of a pertinacious struggle between the players and play-lovers on the one side, and the civic power on the other (who held the stage and everything connected with it in especial dislike), they had become very numerous by the time the great writers we have mentioned were prepared to raise them into their true importance and value. For their success in this struggle, the players were evidently indebted to the court favour they enjoyed, which, in 1583, was signalised by Elizabeth's choosing, from among the different companies accustomed to perform before her, twelve of the best actors, and forming them into a company, under her own especial patronage. The chief London theatres at that period were these :-The Theatre, especially so called, in Shoreditch, and the Curtain close by; Paris Garden, Bankside, chiefly used as a Bear Garden, but also for the performance of plays, as Dekker, in his satire upon Jonson, makes the latter say he had played Zulziman there; the Blackfriars, Whitefriars, Salisbury Court, Rose, Hope, Swan, Newington, Red Bull, and Cockpit or Phoenix in Drury Lane. Various places of minor importance were also dignified by the name of Theatre, as the Inn Yard of the Bel Savage,' remarkable, according to Prynne, "for the visible apparition of the Devil upon the We learn what was the stage," on one occasion, during Elizabeth's reign. number of actors at the same time in the metropolis, from a letter to Secretary Walsingham, in 1586, which, after referring to the different companies, as the Queen's, Lord Leicester's, Lord Oxford's, Lord Nottingham's, and other noblemen's then performing, states the number of players as not less than two hundred. Of these theatres, the Blackfriars is the one that most deeply interests us: it was there, in all probability, Shakspere made his first appearance both as |