and 1666 published thirty-nine plays. In the civil wars he followed his patron, the Earl of Newcastle, to the field; but on the decline of the royal cause, returned to London, and, as the theatres were now shut, kept a school in Whitefriars, where he educated many eminent characters. At the reopening of the theatres he must have been too old to have renewed his dramatic labours; and what benefit the Restoration brought him as a royalist, we are not informed. Both he and his wife died on the same day, immediately after the great fire of London, by which they had been driven out of their house, and probably owed their deaths to their losses and terror on that occasion.

her poems while she was living, paid rhymed tributes to her memory when dead. Her verses are never commonplace, and always sensible, if they hardly attain to the measure and the stature of lofty poetry.

ALEXANDER SCOT.

Alexander Scot flourished about the year 1562. He wrote several short satires and some miscellaneous poems, the prevailing amatory character of which caused him to be called the Scottish Anacreon, though there are many points wanting to complete his resemblance to the Teian bard.-Chambers's "Cyc. Eng. Lit.," vol. i. 154; Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit."

ALEXANDER BROME.

Alexander Brome, born 1620, died 1666. He was an attorney in the Lord Mayor's Court and a poet. He contributed greatly to the promotion of the Restoration by the severity and ridicule with which he treated the Roundheads in the day of their power. He had also a share in the translation of Horace, with Fanshawe, Holiday, Cowley, and others, and published a single comedy, "The Cunning Lovers" which was acted in 1651, at the private house in Drury. Campbell says: "There is a playful variety in his metre, that probably had a better effect in song than in reading. His thoughts on love and the bottle have at least the merit of being decently jovial, though he arrays the trite arguments of convivial invitation in few original images." It seems that Brome had intended to translate Lucretius. Walton commends him highly.

KATHERINE PHILLIPS.

Izaak

Katherine Phillips, born 1631, died 1664. Very little is known, remarks Gilfillan in his Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets," of the life of this lady-poet. She was born in 1631. Her maiden name was Fowler. She married James Phillips, Esq., of the Priory of Cardigan. Her poems, published under the name of "Orinda," were very popular in her lifetime, although it was said they were published without her consent. She translated two of the tragedies of Corneille, and left a volume of letters to Sir Charles Cotterell. These, however, did not appear till after her death. She died of small-pox-then a deadly disease-in 1664. She seems to have been a favourite alike with the wits and the divines of her age. Jeremy Taylor addressed to her his Measures and Offices of Friendship; " Dryden praised her; and Flatman and Cowley, besides imitating

SIR RICHARD MAITLAND.

Sir Richard Maitland, born 1496, died 1586, is more celebrated as a collector of poems than as an original poet. There is however much good taste displayed in his own productions.

ALEXANDER MONTGOMERY.

Alexander Montgomery was the author of an allegorical poem called "The Cherry and the Sloe," published in 1597, which long continued a favourite, and the metre of which was adopted by Burns.-Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit."

ALEXANDER HUME.

The time and place of his birth are unknown. He was a clergyman, and published, in 1589, a volume of hymns or sacred songs; he died in 1609.

KING JAMES VI.

King James VI. published, in 1584, a volume of poetry, "Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie, with the rewlis and cautelis to be pursued and avoided."

EARL OF ANCRUM.

Earl of Ancrum, born 1578, died 1654. Wrote some sonnets of considerable merit.

CARL OF STIRLING.

Earl of Stirling, born 1580, died 1640, published, in 1637, "Recreations with the

John Still, born 1543, died 1607. He was master of St. John's and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, and became afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells. He wrote "Gammer Gurton's Needle," which seems to have been the second earliest regular comedy published in our language. The whole intrigue consists in the search instituted after this unfortunate little implement, which is at last discovered by Hodge himself, on suddenly sitting down in the garment which Gammer Gurton had been repairing. The play is included in Dodsley's collection.. See Campbell's "Specimens"; Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit."

tomy of Wit," Lyly exercised a powerful though injurious influence on the fashionable literature of his day, in prose composition as well as in discourse. His plays were not important enough to found a school. Hazlitt was a warm admirer of Lyly's "Endymion," but evidently, from the feelings and sentiments it awakened, rather than the poetry. "I know few things more perfect in characteristic painting," he remarks, "than the exclamation of the Phrygian shepherds, who, afraid of betraying the secret of Midas's ears, fancy that the very reeds bow down, as though they listened to their talk;' nor more affecting in sentiment, than the apostrophe addressed by his friend Eumenides to Endymion, on waking from his long sleep. 'Behold the twig to which thou laidest down thy head is now become a tree.'" There are finer things in the Metamorphosis, as where the prince laments Eurymene lost in the woods

"Adorned with the presence of my love, The woods I fear such secret power shall

seen,

Only because they would be ever green,
And keep the winged choristers still there,
To banish winter clean out of the year."
Or the song of the fairies-

"By the moon we sport and play,
With the night begins our day:
As we dance the dew doth fall;
Trip it, little urchins all,
Lightly as the little bee,

Two by two, and three by three,
And about go we, and about go we."

The genius of Lyly was essentially lyrical. The songs in his plays seem to flow freely from nature.

JOHN LYLY.

John Lyly was born in Kent in 1554, and produced nine plays between the years 1579 and 1600. They were mostly written for court entertainments, and performed by the scholars of St. Paul's. He was educated at Oxford, and many of his plays are on mythological subjects, as "Sappho and Phaon," Endymion," the "Maid's Metamorphosis,"

&c. His style is affected and unnatural, yet, like his own Niobe, in the "Metamorphosis "oftentimes he had sweet thoughts, onetimes hard conceits; betwixt both a kind of yielding." By his "Euphues," or the "Ana

GEORGE PEELE.

George Peele, like Lyly, had received a liberal education at Oxford. He was one of Shakspere's fellow-actors and fellow-shareholders in the Blackfriars Theatre. He was also employed by the city of London in composing and preparing those spectacles and shows which formed so great a portion of ancient civic festivity. His earliest work, "The Arraignment of Paris," was printed anonymously in 1584. His most celebrated dramatic works were the "David and Bethsabe," and "Absalom," in which there is great richness and beauty of language and occasional indications of a high order of pathetic and elevated emotion; but his versification, though sweet, has little variety; and the luxurious and sensuous descriptions in which

Peele most delighted are so numerous, that they become rather tiresome in the end. It should be remarked that this poet was the first to give an example of the peculiar kind of historical play in which Shakspere was afterwards so consummate a master. His "Edward I. " is, though monotonous, declamatory, and stiff, in some sense the forerunner of such works as "Richard II.,” "Richard III.," or "Henry V.". Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit." p. 130. See Chambers's "Cyc. Eng. Lit.," vol. i.; Campbell's "Spec. Brit. Poets."

"Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Chambers's "Cyc. Eng. Lit."; Campbell's "Specimens "; Wood's "Fasti Oxon."; Haslewood's "Censura Literaria," ii. 288-300; Beloe's "Anec. of Lib. and Scarce Books"; "Drake's Shakspere and his Times"; J. Payne Collier's "Hist. of Eng. Dram. Poets," iii. 153-154; Professor Tieck's Preface to his "Shakspere's Vorschule"; Hallam's "Lit. Hist. of Europe," ii. 173; "British Bibliographer"; Dibdin's "Lib. Comp."; Lowndes's "Bibl. Man."; Dunlop's "Hist. of Fiction."

THOMAS NASH AND ROBERT GREENE.

"Both were Cambridge men, both sharp, and I fear," says Shaw, in his valuable "History of English Literature," mercenary satirists, and both alike in the profligacy of their lives and the misery of their deaths, though they may have eked out their income by occasionally writing for the stage, were in reality rather pasquinaders and pamphleteers than dramatists-condottieri of the press, shamelessly advertising the services of their ready and biting pen to any person or any cause that would pay them. They were both unquestionably men of rare powers, Nash probably the better man and the abler writer of the two. Nash is famous for the bitter controversy with the learned Gabriel Harvey, whom he has caricatured and attacked in numerous pamphlets, in a manner equally humorous and severe. He was concerned with other dramatists in the production of a piece entitled Summer's Last Will and Testament,' and in a satirical comedy, 'The Isle of Dogs,' which drew down upon him the anger of the Government, for we know that he was imprisoned for some time in consequence.

"Greene was, like Nash, the author of a multitude of tracts and pamphlets on the most miscellaneous subjects. Sometimes they were tales, often translated or expanded from the Italian novelists; sometimes amusing exposures of the various arts of coney-catching, which means cheating and swindling, practised at that time in London, and in which, it is feared, Greene was personally not unversed; sometimes moral confessions, like Nash's 'Pierce Pennilesse, his Supplication to the Devil,' or Greene's 'Groat worth of Wit,' purporting to be a warning to others against the consequences of unbridled passion. Some of these confessions are exceedingly pathetic, and would be more so could the reader divest himself of a lurking suspicion that the whole is often a mere trick to catch a penny. The popularity of these tracts, we know, was very great. The only dramatic work we need specify of Greene's was 'George-a-Green,' the legend of an old English popular hero, recounted with much vivacity and humour."-See Allibone's

THOMAS LODGE.

Thomas Lodge, born 1556, died 1625 (?), a physician and dramatic poet; he was born in Lincolnshire, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and first appeared as an author in 1580. Ten of Lodge's poems are contained in the English "Helicon," published in 1600. To his poem entitled Rosalynde: Eupheus Golden Legacie," Shakspere was indebted for the plot and incidents of his drama "As You Like It." He is described by Collier as second to Kyd in vigour and boldness of conception; but as a drawer of character, so essential a part of dramatic poetry, he unquestionably has the advantage., His principal work is a tragedy entitled "The Hounds of Civil War, lively set forth in the two Tragedies of Marius and Sylla." He also composed, in conjunction with Greene, "A Looking-Glass for London and England," the object of which is a defence of the stage against the Puritanical party. See Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit."

66

THOMAS DEKKER.

Thomas Dekker was a very industrious author; he was connected with Jonson in writing for the Lord Admiral's theatre, conducted by Henslowe; but Ben and he became bitter enemies, and the former, in his Poetaster," performed in 1601, has satirized Dekker under the character of Crispinus, representing himself as Horace. Dekker replied by another drama, "Satiromastix; or, the Untrussing the Humorous Poet." The poetic diction of Dekker is choice and elegant, but he often wanders into absurdity. He is supposed to have died about the year 1638. His life seems to have been spent in irregu larity and poverty. According to Oldys, he was three years in the King's Bench. In one of his own beautiful lines he says:

"We ne'er are angels till our passions die." But the old dramatists lived in a world of passion and revelry, want and despair.

(Chambers's "Cyclo. English Lit." vol. ii. 21.) He published the "Gull's Horn Book," of which a new edition was published in 1812, Bristol, 4to, edited by Dr. Nott. Drake says of this work, "His Gul's Horne Booke, or Fashions to please all Sorts of Guls,' first printed in 1609, exhibits a very curious, minute, and interesting picture of the manners and habits of the middle class of society.". See Lowndes's "Bibl. Man."; Warton's "Hist. Eng. Poetry"; "Bibl. Anglo-Poet."; Collier's "Hist. of Eng. Dramatic Poets."

HENRY CHETTLE.

He was a dramatic writer of the age of Elizabeth. He wrote the tragedy of "Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father," 1631; and was concerned, more or less, according to "Henslowe's Diary," in the production of thirty-eight plays, only four of which have been printed, and have come down to us.Seo Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Collier's "Hist. of English Dramatic Poetry" Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit."

WILLIAM HAUGHTON.

William Haughton was the author of a number of dramatic pieces, of which the comedy of "Englishmen for my Money" is one of the best known. He wrote the comedy of Patient Grissill," in which he was assisted by Chettle and Dekker.-See "Biog. Dramat."; Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng.

Lit."

DABRIDGECOURT BELCHIER. Dabridgecourt Belchier was admitted at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1508; removed to Christchurch, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1600. He translated into English "Hans Beerport, his Risible Comedy of See me and See me Not," 1618. Wood ascribes some other pieces to him.-See Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Campbell's "Specimens."

JOHN WEBSTER.

John Webster, the "noble-minded," as Hazlitt designates him, lived and died about the same time as Dekker, with whom he wrote in the conjunct authorship then so common. His original dramas are the "Duchess of Malfy," "Guise, or the Massacre

""Appius

has

of France," the "Devil's Law Case,' and Virginia," and the "White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona." Webster, it been said, was clerk of St. Andrew's church, Holborn; but Mr. Dyce, his editor and biographer, searched the registers of the parish for his name without success. The "White Devil" and the "Duchess of Malfy" have divided the opinions of critics as to their relative merits. They are both powerful dramas, though filled with " supernumerary horrors." The former was not successful on the stage, and the author published it with a dedication, in which he states, that "most of the people that come to the play-house resemble those ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." He was accused, like Jonson, of being a slow writer, but he consoles himself with the example of Euripides, and confesses that he did not write with a goose quill winged with two feathers. In this slighted play there are some exquisite touches of pathos and natural feeling. The grief of a group of mourners over a dead body is thus described :

"I found them winding of Marcello's corse, And there in such a solemn melody, "Tween doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies, Such as old grandames watching by the dead Were wont to outwear the night with; that, believe me,

I had no eyes to guide me forth the room, They were so o'ercharged with water." The funeral dirgo for Marcello, sung by his mother, possesses, says Charles Lamb, "that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates :

"Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole,

The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To raise him hillocks that shall keep him

warm,

And, when gay tombs are robb'd, sustain no

harm;

But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to

men,

For with his nails he'll dig them up again." The following couplet has been admired :-"Glories. like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But look'd to near, have neither heat nor light."

The "Duchess of Malfy" abounds more in the terrible graces. It turns on the mortal offence which the lady gives to her two proud brothers, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and a cardinal, by indulging in a generous though infatuated passion for Antonio, her steward.

-(Chambers, vol. i. pp. 211, 212.) Shaw says, "But perhaps the most powerful and original genius among the Shaksperian dramatists of the second order is John Webster. His terrible and funereal Muse on Death;' his wild imagination revelled in images and sentiments which breathe, as it were, the odour of the charnel: his plays are full of pictures recalling with fantastic variety all associations of the weakness and futility of human hopes and interests, and dark questionings of our future destinies. His literary physiognomy has something of that dark, bitter, and woeful expression which makes us thrill in the portraits of Dante. In selecting such revolting themes as abounded in the black annals of medieval Italy, Webster followed the peculiar bent of his great and morbid genius; in the treatment of these subjects, we find a strange mixture of the horrible with the pathetic. In his language there is an extraordinary union of complexity and simplicity: he loves to draw his illustrations not only from skulls and graves and epitaphs, but also from the most attractive and picturesque objects in nature;' and his occasional intermingling of the deepest and most innocent emotion of the most exquisite touches of natural beauty produces the effect of the daisy springing up amid the festering mould of the graveyard."

THOMAS MIDDLETON

Thomas Middleton is admired for a wild and fantastic fancy, which delights in portraying scenes of witchcraft and supernatural agency-such is the correct estimate of Shaw, in his excellent work, the "Hist. of Eng. Lit."

JOHN FORD.

John Ford, born 1586, died 1610 (?). "Ho was born of a respectable family in Devonshire was bred to the law, and entered of the Middle Temple at the age of seventeen. At the age of twenty he published a poem, entitled Fame's Memorial,' in honour of the deceased Earl of Devonshire; and from the dedication of that piece it appears that he chiefly subsisted upon his professional labours, making poetry the solace of his leisure hours. All his plays were published between the years 1629 and 1659; but before the former period he had for some time been known as a dramatic writer, his works having been printed a considerable time after their appearance on the stage; and, according to the custom of the age, had been associated in several works with other composers. With Dekker he joined in dramatizing a story, which reflects

more disgrace upon the age than all its genius could redeem; namely, the fate of Mother Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, an aged woman, who had been recently the victim of legal and superstitious murder

'Nil adeo fœdum quod non exacta vetustas Ediderit.'

The time of his death is unknown."(Campbell's Specimens, p. 166.) See Shaw's "Hist. Eng. Lit. "; Professor Spalding's "Hist. Eng. Lit."; Weber's cd. of Ford's Works; Lord Jeffrey's article "Edin. Rev.," x. 275, 304; John Gifford, " Quart. Rev.," vi. 462-487; Lamb's "Specimens of Eng. Dram. Poets."

PHILIP MASSINGER.

"Of the personal history of Philip Massinger little is known. This excellent poet was born in 1584, and died, apparently very poor, in 1640. His birth was that of a gentleman, his education good, and even learned; for though his stay in the University of Oxford, which he entered in 1602, was not longer than two years, his works prove, by the uniform elegance and refined dignity of their diction, and by the peculiar fondness with which he dwells on classical allusions, that he was intimately penetrated with the finest essence of the great classical writers of antiquity. His theatrical life, extending from 1604 to his death, appears to have been an uninterrupted succession of struggle, disappointment, and distress; and we possess one touching document, proving how deep and general was that distress in the dramatic profession of the time. It is a letter written to Henslowe, the manager of the Globe Theatre, in the joint names of Massinger, Field, and Daborne, all poets of considerable popularity, imploring the loan of an insignificant sum to liberate them from a debtors' prison. Like most of his fellow-dramatists, Massinger frequently wrote in partnership with other playwrights, the names of Dekker, Field, Rowley, Middleton, and others, being often found in conjunction with his. We possess the titles of about thirty-seven plays, either entirely or partially written by Massinger, of which number, however, only eighteen are now extant, the remainder having been lost or destroyed. These works are tragedies, comedies, and romantic dramas, partaking of both characters. The finest of them are the following: the Fatal Dowry'; the Unnatural Combat'; the Roman Actor,' and the 'Duke of Milan,' in the first category: the 'Bondman,' the 'Maid of Honour,' and the Picture,' in the third; and the Old Law,' and 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' in the second. The qualities which distinguish this noble writer