And let the head be taken off to look

What 'tis. Some slave hath practised an imposture
To stir the people.

Sat. The head, my lord, already is ta'en off,
I saw it; and, at opening, there leapt out
A great and monstrous serpent.

Sej. Monstrous! why?

Had it a beard and horns? no heart? a tongue
Forkèd as flattery? look'd it of the hue

To such as live in great men's bosoms? was
The spirit of it Macro's?!

Why, then the falling of our bed, that brake

This morning, burden'd with the populous weight Of our expecting clients, to salute us;

Or running of the cat betwixt our legs,

As we set forth unto the Capitol,
Were prodigies.

Ter. I think them ominous,

And would they had not happened! as, to-day
The fate of some your servants, who, declining
Their way, not able, for the throng, to follow,
Slipt down the Gemonies and brake their necks!
Besides, in taking your last augury,

No prosperous bird appear'd; but croaking ravens

1 Rival and successor to Sejanus.

2 Turning from.

Flagg'd up and down, and from the sacrifice
Flew to the prison, where they sat all night
Beating the air with their obstreperous1 beaks!
I dare not counsel but I would entreat
That great Sejanus would attempt the gods
Once more with sacrifice.

Sej. What excellent fools

Religion makes of men! Believes Terentius,
If these were dangers, as I shame to think them,
The gods could change the certain course of fate?
Or, if they could, they would, now in a moment,
For a beeve's fat, or less, be bribed to invert
Those long decrees? Then think the gods, like flies,
Are to be taken with the steam of flesh

Or blood, diffused about their altars: think
Their power as cheap as I esteem it small.-
Of all the throng that fill th' Olympian hall
And, without pity, lade poor Atlas' back,
I know not that one deity, but Fortune,
To whom I would throw up in begging smoke
One grain of incense; or whose ear I'd buy
With thus much oil. Her I, indeed, adore,
And keep her grateful image in my house,
Sometime belonging to a Roman king.
To her I care not, if, for satisfying

Your scrupulous phant'sies, sins, I go offer. Bid
Our priest prepare us honey, milk, and poppy,
His masculine odors, and night-vestments: say
Our rites are instant, which performed, you'll see
How vain and worthy laughter your fears be.

If you will, Destinies, that, after all,

I faint now ere I touch my period,3

Exeunt all but Sej.

You are but cruel; and I already have done

Things great enough. All Rome hath been my slave;
The senate sate an idle looker on

And witness of my power; when I have blush'd
More to command than it to suffer: all

The fathers have sate ready and prepared

1 Noisy.

2 Doomed to hold up the heavens.

3 Highest point.

To give me empire, temples, or their throats
When I would ask 'em; and, what crowns the top,
Rome, senate, people, all the world have seen
Jove but my equal, Cæsar but my second.

'Tis then your malice, Fates, who, but your own,
Envy and fear to have my power long known.

HIS MASQUES." Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that we connect the Masques. Masques were dramatic representations made for a festive occasion, with a reference to the persons present and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a whole. They were made and performed for the court and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute in Henry VIII.'s time, they reached splendor under James and Charles I. Great men took part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the scenery, and Lawes the music, and Lord Bacon, Whitelock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made them worthier by writing Comus, and their scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular theatres.

Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, but out of more than fifty plays, all written in James I.'s reign, not more than fourteen were shared in by Beaumont, who died at the age of thirty in 1616. Fletcher survived him, and died in 1625. Both were of gentle birth. Beaumont, where we can trace his work, is weightier and more dignified than his comrade, but Fletcher was the better poet. Fletcher wrote rapidly, but his imagination worked slowly. Their Philaster and Thierry and Theodoret are fine examples of their tragic power. Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is full of lovely poetry, and both are masters of grace and pathos and style. They enfeebled the

blank verse of the drama, while they rendered it sweeter by using feminine endings and adding an eleventh syllable with great frequency. This gave freedom and elasticity to their verse and was suited to the dialogue of comedy, but it lowered the dignity of their tragedy.

These two men mark a change in politics and society from Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare's loyalty is constitutional; Beaumont and Fletcher are blind supporters of James I.'s invention of the divine right of kings. Shakespeare's society was on the whole decent, and it is so in his plays. Beaumont and Fletcher are 'studiously indecent.' In contrast with them Shakespeare is as white as snow. Shakespeare's men are of the type of Sidney and Raleigh, Burleigh and Drake. The men of these two writers represent the 'young bloods' of the Stuart Court; and even the best of their older and graver men are base and foul in thought. Their women are either monsters of badness or of goodness. When they paint a good woman (two or three at most being excepted), she is beyond. nature. The fact is, that the high art, which in Shakespeare sought to give a noble pleasure by being true to human nature in its natural aspects, sank now into the baser art, which wished to excite, at any cost, the passions of the audience by representing human nature in unnatural aspects.

In Massinger and Ford this evil is just as plainly marked. MASSINGER'S first dated play was the Virgin Martyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died 'a stranger' in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Pay Old Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles Overreach. No writer is fouler in language, and there is a want of unity of impression both in his plots and in his characters. He often sacrifices art to effect, and unlike Shakespeare, seems often to despise his own characters.' On the other hand, his versification and language are flexible and strong, and seem to rise out of the passions he describes.' He speaks the tongue of real life. His men and women are

6

far more natural than those of Beaumont and Fletcher, and, with all his coarseness, he is the most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere else is his work so great as when he represents the brave man struggling through trial to victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth and love; or when he describes the terrors that conscience brings on injustice and cruelty.

JOHN FORD, his contemporary, published his first play, the Lover's Melancholy, in 1629, and five years after, Perkin Warbeck, the best historical drama after Shakespeare. Between these dates appeared others, of which the best is the Broken Heart. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so with very great power. He has no comic humor, but no man has described better the worn and tortured human heart.

WEBSTER AND OTHER DRAMATISTS.-Higher as a poet, and possessing the same power as Ford, though not the same exquisite tenderness, was JOHN WEBSTER, whose best drama, The Duchess of Malfi, was acted in 1616. Vittoria Corombona was printed in 1612, and was followed by the Devil's Law Case, Appius and Virginia, and others. Webster's peculiar power of creating ghastly horror is redeemed from sensationalism by his poetic insight. His imagination easily saw, and expressed in short and intense lines, the inmost thoughts and feelings of characters, whom he represents as wrought on by misery or crime or remorse, at their very highest point of passion. In his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, and this poetic pity brings him nearer to Shakespeare than to the rest. He is also neither so coarse nor so great a king worshipper nor so irreligious as the others. We seem to taste the Puritan in his work. Two comedies, Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! remarkable for the light they throw on the manners of the time, were written by him along with THOMAS DEKKER.

GEORGE CHAPMAN is the only one of the later Elizabethan