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."

NOTE ON SIDNEY'S DEFENCE OF POESY.'

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."

THE earliest, and the most permanent, of poetical associations are those which are impressed upon the mind by localities which have a deep historical interest. It would be difficult to find a district possessing more striking remains of a past time than the neighbourhood in which William Shakspere spent his youth. The poetical feeling which the battle-fields, and castles, and monastic ruins of mid England would excite in him, may be reasonably considered to have derived an intensity through the real history of these celebrated spots being vague, and for the most part traditional. The age of local historians had not yet arrived. The monuments of the past were indeed themselves much more fresh and perfect than in the subsequent days, when every tomb inscription was copied, and every mouldering document set forth. But in the year 1580, if William Shakspere desired to know, for example, with some precision, the history which belonged to those noble towers of Warwick upon which he had often gazed

with a delight that scarcely required to be based upon knowledge, he would look in vain for any guide to his inquiries. Some old people might tell him that they remembered their fathers to have spoken of one John Rous, the son of Geffrey Rous of Warwick, who, having diligently studied at Oxford, and obtained a reputation for uncommon learning, rejected all ambitious thoughts, shut himself up with his books in the solitude of Guy's Cliff, and was engaged to the last in writing the Chronicles of his country, and especially the history of his native County and its famous Earls: and there, in the quiet of that pleasant place, performing his daily offices of devotion as a chantry priest in the little chapel, did John Rous live a life of happy industry till 1491. But the world in general derived little advantage from his labours. Another came after him, commissioned by royal authority to search into all the archives of the kingdom, and to rescue from damp and dust all ancient manuscripts, civil and ecclesiastical. The commission of Leland was well performed; but his 'Itinerary' was also to be of little use to his own generation. William Shakspere knew not what Leland had written about Warwickshire; how the enthusiastic and half-poetical antiquary had described, in elegant Latinity, the beauties of woodland and river; and had even given the characteristics of such a place as Guy's Cliff in a few happy words, that would still be an accurate description of its natural features, even after the lapse of three centuries. Caves hewn in the living rock, a thick overshadowing wood, sparkling springs, flowery meadows, mossy grottos, the river rolling over the stones with a gentle noise, solitude and the quiet most friendly to the Muses, these are the enduring features of the place