gravity, under which the audience were liable to yawn and sleep, the Devil was retained, and a more natural buffoon was introduced in the Vice, who acted the part of a broad, rampant jester. These two were the darlings of the multitude. Full of pranks and swaggering fun, a part of Vice's ordinary business was to treat the Devil with ribald familiarity, to crack saucy jokes upon him, to bestride him and beat him till he roared, and in the end to be carried off to Hell on his back.

The next step was the relinquishing of abstract for individual characters, a transition represented by Heywood's Interludes, long before acted in the midst of the morality for the amusement of the people, but now secularized, and made into a kind of farce.

The interlude paved the way for the representation of real life and manners, the first stage of which begins with Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, a comedy, and Sackvill's Gorboduc, a tragedy. It soon passed to a splendid maturity, extending in a single generation over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy. From the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the accession of Anne (1580-1702), and particularly to the great rebellion (15801642), may be reckoned the period of the old English dramatists, among whom Shakespeare stood preeminent. He, with the constellation of kindred spirits about him, raised the romantic or Gothic drama to the highest perfection it has ever achieved. Its subsequent general tendency has been downward. Sheridan's School for Scandal, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Knowles' Virginius, Bulwer's Richelieu and Lady of Lyons, are nearly the sole dramas, since produced, that have possessed literary merit and, at the same time, the qualities requisite for successful presentation. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, have adopted the dramatic form, but only to show how rare a

gift is popular dramatic art - the art of portraying actual life and passion in interesting situations. Most of the successful plays, on the other hand, do not and cannot, rise into the region of literature. They succeed less by vivid language and vigorous thought than by pomp and noise, transferring the stress from the mental to the physical.

Literary compositions run into each other, like colors; easily distinguished in their strong tints, but susceptible of so much variety, and of so many different forms, that we never can say precisely where one species ends and another begins. The shore-marks of poetical division rest, now on style, now on matter, now on purpose, but do not, save in single features, define and subdivide the field. In most poems there is a mixture of all the modes of poetic effect, leaving it doubtful which type is most closely adhered to. Convenient designations for ordinary speech would be epic, like Milton's great poem; dramatic, like Shakespeare's plays; lyric, like the songs in his plays; narrative, like the Lady of the Lake; descriptive, like the Seasons; allegorical, like the Faerie Queene; didactic, like Pope's Essay on Criticism; satirical, intended to vituperate, to lash, or to reform, like the Hudibras.

It remains to indicate some of the uses of poetry. (1) It is the great thesaurus of beauty, embellishment, and illustration. The eminent Brougham has said that the art of happy quotation is second only to that of happy invention. (2) It is an important aid to genuine copiousness and flow of language. So practical a man as Dr. Franklin, having recognized it as an important source of his own excellent English, recommended the study of poetry and the writing of verse for this very purpose. (3) It cultivates a love of high thought, and tends to give to our taste for reading the stability of habit. (4) It gives an æsthetic culture and refinement to the mind, and disposes the heart to virtue. It is the province of poetry

to idealize nature and human life, to exhibit the soul in the richness and variety of its sentiments, in the nobleness of its aspirations and in the greatness of its possibilities. To it belong elegance, beauty, harmony, and grandeur, all that can ennoble the fancy and exalt the affections. The end of poetry is refined enjoyment through emotion. In it there is always exultation, a subtle, blooming spirituality. 'What a treat,' exclaims Dr. Arnold, thinking of the resultant self-improvement, it would be to teach Shakespeare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens; to dwell upon him line by line and word by word, and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leisurely into one's mind, till I verily think one would, after a time, almost give out light in the dark, after having been steeped, as it were, in such an atmosphere of brilliance!' To what end is our life, if not to soul culture, perpetual ascension in the scale of being? In this the poets help us by seizing and holding up to view the noblest, cleanest, and best, that there is.

The finer thoughts, the thrilling sense,

The electric blood with which their arteries run,
Their body's self-turned soul with the intense
Feeling of that which is, and fancy of

That which should be.'

enable them, more powerfully than other authors, to awaken in their readers the states of consciousness that exist in themselves. (5) As a corollary, it is the mission of poetry to sweeten existence, to nourish human sympathies; to fill us with faith, strength, and cheer, when in the desert of life we faint and stagger; to reveal to our duller eyes and colder hearts the beauty and gladness of nature; in short, to furnish the finest and deepest-reaching discipline of which our spiritual being is capable. In order to receive these benefits, it must be studied, that is, read reflectively. To read anything profitably, read it actively.

INDEX.

Arts, classification of, 2, 228.
Association of ideas, 234.
Asyndeton, 25.
Authority, 202.
Autumn, beauty of, 83.

Bacon, Lord, quoted, 40, 84, 117,
131, 133, 136, 269.

Alford, Dean, quoted, 39, 71, 90, Baily, Samuel, quoted, 194.

Alliteration, defined, 26; in poe- Bancroft, quoted, 141.