enters and demands the release of his servant, which the Chief Justice refuses. The scene which ensues when the Prince strikes the Chief Justice is a remarkable example of the poetical poverty of the early stage. In the representation the action would of course be exciting, but the dialogue which accompanies it is beyond comparison bald and meaningless. The audience was, however, compensated by Tarleton's iteration of the scene:-" Faith, John, I'll tell thee what; thou shalt be my lord chief justice, and thou shalt sit in the chair; and I'll be the young prince, and hit thee a box on the ear; and then thou shalt say, To teach you what prerogatives mean, I commit you to the Fleet." The Prince is next presented really in prison, where he is visited by Sir John Oldcastle. The Prince, in his dialogue with Jockey, Ned, and Tom, again exhibits himself as the basest and most vulgar of ruffians; but, hearing his father is sick, he goes to Court, and the bully, in the twinkling of an eye, becomes a saintly hypocrite :-" Pardon me, sweet father, pardon me: good my lord of Exeter, speak for me: pardon me, pardon, good father: not a word: ah, he will not speak one word: ah, Harry, now thrice unhappy Harry. But what shall I do? I will go take me into some solitary place, and there lament my sinful life, and, when I have done, I will lay me down and die." The scene where the Prince removes the crown, poor as it is in poetical conception, touches the Stratford audience; and there is one there who fancies he could extemporize that scene into something more touching. Henry IV. dies; Henry V. is crowned; the evil companions are cast off; the Chief Justice is forgiven; and the expedition to France is resolved upon. To trace the course of the war would be too much for the patience of our readers. The clashing of the four swords and bucklers might have rendered its stage representation endurable, and Derrick has become a soldier. This is the wit set down for him: :

"Derrick. I was four or five times slain.

John. Four or five times slain! Why, how couldst thou have been alive now?

Derrick. O John, never say so, for I was called the bloody soldier amongst them all.

John. Why, what didst thou?

Derrick. Why, I will tell thee, John: every day when I went into the field, I would take a straw, and thrust it into my nose, and make my nose bleed; and then I would go into the field; and when the captain saw me, he would say, Peace, ah bloody soldier; and bid me stand aside, whereof I was glad."

The scene which Nashe represented as a glorious thing does not violate the historical fact in making Henry lead the French king prisoner; but there is a swearing of fealty in which the Dauphin participates :

66

:

Henry V. Well, my good brother of France, there is one thing I
must needs desire.

French King. What is that, my good brother of England?
Henry V. That all your nobles must be sworn to be true to me.

diarum actorem; Cicero suum Roscium: nos Angli Tarletonum, in cujus voce et vultu omnes joc osi affectus, in cujus cerebroso capite lepidæ facetiæ habitant.'"

French King. Whereas they have not stuck with greater matters, I know they will not stick with such a trifle: begin you with my lord duke of Burgundy.

Henry V. Come, my lord of Burgundy, take your oath upon my sword.

Burgundy. I, Philip duke of Burgundy, swear to Henry king of England to be true to him, and to become his league-man; and that, if I, Philip, hear of any foreign power coming to invade the said Henry, or his heirs, then I, the said Philip, to send him word, and aid him with all the power I can make; and thereunto I take my oath.

[He kisseth the sword,

Henry V. Come, prince Dolphin, you must swear too.

[He kisseth the sword."

It was about the period which we are now touching upon that Sidney wrote his Defence of Poesy.' The drama was then as he has described it, "much used in England, and none can be more pitifully abused; which, like an unmannerly daughter showing a bad education, causeth her mother Poesy's honour to be called in question." The early framers of the drama seem scarcely to have considered that she was the daughter of Poesy. A desire for dramatic exhibitions—not a new desire, but taking a new direction-had forcibly seized upon the English people. The demand was to be supplied as it best might be, by the players who were to profit by it. They were, as they always will be, the best judges of what would please an audience; and it was to be expected that, having within themselves the power of constructing the rude plot of any popular story, so as to present rapid movement, and what in the language of the stage is called business, the beauty or even propriety of the dialogue would be a secondary consideration, and indeed would be pretty much left to the extemporal invention of the actor. That the wit of the clown was almost entirely of this nature we have the most distinct evidence. Sidney, with all his fine taste, was a stickler for "place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. For," he says, "where the stage should always represent one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day, there is both many days and many places inartificially imagined." As the players were the rude builders of our early drama, and as that drama was founded upon the ruder Mysteries and Moral Plays, in which all propriety was disregarded, so that the senses could be gratified, they naturally rejected the unities of time and place, the observance of which would have deprived their plays of their chief attraction-rapid change and abundant incident. And fortunate was it that they did so; for they thus went on strengthening and widening the foundations of our national drama, the truth and freedom of which could not exist under a law which is not the law of nature. Had Sidney lived five or six years longer, had he seen or read Romeo and Juliet, or A Midsummer-Night's Dream, he would probably have ceased to regard the drama as the unmannerly daughter of Poesy; he would in all likelihood have thought that something was gained even through the “defectuous circumstances" that spurn the bounds of time and place, and compel the imagination to be still or to travel at its bidding, to be utterly regardless of the

halt or the march of events, so that one dominant idea possess the soul and sway all its faculties. But this was only to be effected when a play was to become a great work of art; when all the conditions of its excellence should be fully comprehended; when it should unite the two main conditions of the highest excellence—that of subjecting the popular mind to its power, through the skill which only the most refined understanding can altogether appreciate. When the young man of Stratford, who, as we have conceived, knew the drama of his time through the representations of itinerant players, heard the rude dialogue of The Famous Victories' not altogether without delight, and laughed most heartily at the extemporal pleasantness of the witty clown, a vivid though an imperfect notion of the excellence that might be attained by working up such common materials upon a principle of art must assuredly have been developed in his mind. If Sidney's noble defence of his beloved Poesy had then been published, he would, we think, have found in it a reflection of his own opinions as to the "bad education" of the drama. "All their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion: so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained." The objection here is scarcely so much to the mingling kings and clowns, when "the matter so carrieth," as to the thrusting in the clown by head and shoulders. Upon a right principle of art the familiar and the heroic might be advantageously blended. Here, in this play of 'The Famous Victories,' the Prince was not only prosaic, but altogether brutalized, so that the transition from the ruffian to the hero was distasteful and unnatural. But surround the same Prince with companions whose profligacy was in some sort balanced and counteracted by their intellectual energy, their wit, their genial mirthfulness; make the Prince a gentleman in the midst of his most wanton levity; and the transition to the hero is not merely probable, it is graceful in itself, it satisfies expectation. But the young poet is yet without models, and he will remain so. He has to work out his own theory of art; but that theory must be gradually and experimentally formed. He has the love of country living in his soul as a presiding principle. There are in his country's annals many stories such as this of Henry V. that might be brought upon the stage to raise "heroes from the grave of oblivion," for glorious example to "these degenerate days." But in those annals are also to be found fit subjects for " the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants to manifest their tyrannical humours; that, with stirring the affections of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilded roofs are builded." As the young poet left the Town Hall of Stratford he would forget Tarleton and his tricks; he would think that an English historical play was yet to be written; perhaps, as the ambitious thought crossed his mind to undertake such a task, the noble lines of Sackville would be present to his memory :—

* Sidney. 'Defence of Poesy.'

"And sorrowing I to see the summer flowers,
The lively green, the lusty leas forlorn,

The sturdy trees so shatter'd with the showers,
The fields so fade that flourish'd so beforn;
It taught me well all earthly things be born
To die the death, for nought long time may last;
The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast.

Then looking upward to the heaven's leams,
With night's stars thick-powdered everywhere,
Which erst so glisten'd with the golden streams
That cheerful Phoebus spread down from his sphere,
Beholding dark oppressing day so near:
The sudden sight reduced to my mind
The sundry changes that in earth we find.

That musing on this worldly wealth in thought,
Which comes and goes more faster than we see
The flickering flame that with the fire is wrought,
My busy mind presented unto me

Such fall of peers as in this realm had be:

That oft I wish'd some would their woes descrive, To warn the rest whom fortune left alive."

It has scarcely, we think, been noticed that the justly-celebrated work of Sir Philip Sidney forms an important part of the controversy, not only against the Stage, but against Poetry and Music, that appears to have commenced in England a little previous to 1580. Gosson, as we have seen, attacks the Stage, not only for its especial abuses, but because it partakes of the general infamy of Poetry. According to this declaimer, it is "the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison throughout the world." Gosson dedicated his 'School of Abuse' to Sidney; and Spenser, in one of his letters to Gabriel Harvey, shows how Sidney received the compliment:" New books I hear of none; but only of one that, writing a certain book called 'The School of Abuse,' and dedicating it to Master Sidney, was for his labour scorned; if, at least, it be in the goodness of that nature to scorn. Such folly is it not to regard aforehand the inclination and quality of him to whom we dedicate our books." We have no doubt that the Defence of Poesy,' or, as it was first called, An Apology for Poetry,' was intended as a reply to the dedicator. There is every reason to believe that it was written in 1581. Sidney can scarcely avoid pointing at Gosson when he speaks of the "Poet-haters," as of "people who seek a praise by dispraising others," that they "do prodigally spend a great many wandering words in quips and scoffs, carping and taunting at each thing which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the brain from a thorough beholding the worthiness of the subject." We have seen how the early fanatical writers against the stage held that a Poet and a Liar were synonymous. To this ignorant invective, calculated for the lowest understandings, Sidney gives a brief and direct answer: -“That they should be the principal liars, I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly, that, of all writers under the sun, the poet is the least liar, and though he would, as a poet, can scarcely be a liar. The astronomer, with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape when they take upon them to measure the height of the stars. How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest which take upon them to affirm: Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth; for, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false: So as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies: But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth, the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth: He citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to aspire unto him a good invention: In troth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be. And therefore, though he recount things not true, yet, because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not, unless we will say that Nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to David; which as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I none so simple would say that Æsop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who thinketh that Æsop wrote it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of. What child is there that, coming to play and seeing Thebes' written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If then a man can arrive to the child's age, to know that the poet's persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively, written; and therefore, as in history, looking for truth, they may go away full fraught with falsehood, so in poesy, looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative groundplat of a profitable invention."