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"And then I went into Griffin's to have my boots hobbed, and then I went to Riggs's batty-cake shop, and asked 'em for a penneth of the cheapest and nicest stales, that were all but blue-mouldy but not quite. And whilst I was chawing 'em down I walked on and seed a clock with a face as big as a baking-trendle

"But that's nothing to do with mistress!

"I'm coming to that, if you'll leave me alone, Mister Oak! remonstrated Cainy. "If you excites me, perhaps you'll bring on my cough, and then I shan't be able to tell ye nothing."

"Yes-let him tell it his own way," said Coggan.

Gabriel settled into a despairing attitude of patience, and Cainy went

on:

"And there were great large houses, and more people all the week long than at Weatherbury club-walking on White Tuesdays. And I went to grand churches and chapels. And how the parson would pray! Yes, he would kneel down, and put up his hands together, and make the holy gold rings on his fingers gleam and twinkle in yer eyes, that he'd earned by praying so excellent well!-Ah yes, I wish I lived there."

"Our poor Parson Thirdly can't get no money to buy such rings," said Matthew Moon thoughtfully. "And as good a man as ever walked. I don't believe poor Thirdly have a single one, even of humblest tin or copper. Such a great ornament as they'd be to him on a dull afternoon, when he's up in the pulpit lighted by the wax candles! But 'tis impossible, poor man. Ah, to think how unequal things be." "Perhaps he's made of different stuff than to wear 'em," said Gabriel grimly. "Well, that's enough of this. Go on, Cainy-quick."

"Oh-and the new style of parsons wear moustaches and long beards," continued the illustrious traveller, "and look like Moses and Aaron complete, and make we fokes in the congregation feel all over like the children of Israel."

"A very right feeling-very," said Joseph Poorgrass.

"And there's two religions going on in the nation now-High Church and High Chapel. And, thinks I, I'll play fair; so I went to High Church in the morning, and High Chapel in the afternoon."

"A right and proper boy," said Joseph Poorgrass.

"Well, at High Church they pray singing, and believe in all the colours of the rainbow; and at High Chapel they pray preaching, and believe in drab and whitewash only. And then-I didn't see no more of Miss Everdene at all."

"Why didn't you say so before, then?" exclaimed Oak, with much disappointment.

"Ah," said Matthew Moon, "she'll wish her cake dough if so be she's over intimate with that man."

"She's not over intimate with him," said Gabriel, indignantly.

"She would know better," said Coggan. "Our mis'ess has too much sense under those knots of black hair to do such a mad thing."

"You see, he's not a coarse ignorant man, for he was well brought up," said Matthew, dubiously. "'Twas only wildness that made him a

soldier, and maids rather like your man of sin."

“Now, Cain Ball," said Gabriel restlessly, "can you swear in the most awful form that the woman you saw was Miss Everdene?"

"Cain Ball, you are no longer a babe and suckling," said Joseph in the sepulchral tone the circumstances demanded, "and you know what taking an oath is. 'Tis a horrible testament, mind ye, which you say and seal with your blood-stone, and the prophet Matthew tells us that on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder. Now, before all the work-folk here assembled can you swear to your words as the shepherd asks ye?"

"Please no, Mister Oak!" said Cainy, looking from one to the other with great uneasiness at the spiritual magnitude of the position. “I don't mind saying 'tis true, but I don't like to say 'tis d

that's what you mane."

"Cain, Cain, how can you!" said Joseph sternly.

true, if

"You are asked. to swear in a holy manner, and you swear like wicked Shimei, the son of Gera, who cursed as he came. Young man, fie!"

"No, I don't! 'Tis you want to squander a pore boy's soul, Joseph Poorgrass-that's what 'tis !" said Cain, beginning to cry. "All I mane

is that in common truth 'twas Miss Everdene and Sergeant Troy, but in the horrible so-help-me truth that ye want to make of it perhaps 'twas somebody else."

"There's no getting at the rights of it," said Gabriel, turning to his

work.

"Cain Ball, you'll come to a bit of bread!" groaned Joseph Poorgrass.

Then the reapers' hooks were flourished again, and the old sounds went on. Gabriel, without making any pretence of being lively, did nothing to show that he was particularly dull. However, Coggan knew pretty nearly how the land lay, and when they were in a nook together he said

"Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?"

"That's the very thing I say to myself," said Gabriel.

23

Chapman's Dramatic Works.*

Ir is a fair question for the curious, why the comedies and tragedies of one of the greatest of the Elizabethan dramatists have never been printed in a complete form until now. Some of them, in fact, are altogether lost, and most of them have never attained the dignity of a second edition. And now that we have them all before us, this very edition recalls the remarkable fact, that Shakspeare alone, of all the dramatic writers who wrote under Elizabeth, James, and Charles, can be named as an English classic. More than this, there is no other English play-writer, except (strangely enough) Sheridan, who can take his place among English classics. For by a classic must be meant, not merely one whose works are read by those who study the literature of a country in its completeness, but one who is a classic in the sense that the Greek dramatists are classics, and that Shakspeare, Bacon, and Milton are classics. In this sense the whole race of English dramatists, so great and popular in their day, of whom Ben Jonson and Chapman are among the earlier types, and Dryden one of the later, can hardly be numbered among those who still help to form the existing English mind. To the ordinary English gentleman they are known only by extracts.

Nor are the causes of this failure to ensure immortality very obvious at first sight. One cause which is commonly cited is by no means sufficient to account for the fact. It is commonly said that the old plays are licentious and broad, and that it is our modern delicacy, or prudery, or fastidiousness, call it which we will, which has condemned the older writers to oblivion. Yet this can hardly be the whole case, for who can be more "broad" than Chaucer in some of his Canterbury Tales? Yet Chaucer is undeniably an English classic. He is broad, not only in the extreme plainness with which he calls a spade a spade, but he is broad in the very substance of some of his stories themselves. Our modern plays, too, are often broad enough in their plots and in their doubles entendres; and it is manifest that the supposed delicacy of mind which forbids the reprinting of the elder plays, or of Wycherley, or Congreve, or Vanbrugh, or Beaumont and Fletcher, for miscellaneous family reading, is not a little the result of that utter hypocrisy which pervades our popular talk and popular belief in all matters of religion and morals. There is no harm in the world, it is thought, in the singing of "La ci darem" in the most

* The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, now first collected, with Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author. In Three Volumes. London: John Pearson, York Street, Covent Garden, 1873.

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respectably rigid of drawing-rooms; but then are not the words in Italian, and is not the music by the "divine Mozart? So it is with another of the divine Mozart's whole operas, Le Nozze di Figaro. Is it not all in Italian? Or, in other words, is it not all a double entendre from beginning to end, which the mammas may understand, but not the more innocent members of proper society? The ballet-girl of the period is, indeed, by no means a double entendre, and she is a phenomenon to be carefully studied by those who would estimate the sincerity of the religious professions of the age we are living in.

Here, in truth, are two of the most striking illustrations of the difference between the social ideas of the ages of Elizabeth and Victoria. Under Elizabeth and James we have the talk of Holywell Street uttered by players of the male sex alone, for the appearance of women upon the stage was unknown: under Victoria we have the most highly improving sentiments lisped by women in men's clothing, supported by clouds of ballet-dancers, who, whether they are dressed in male or female clothing, are invariably girls. What a marvellous change in the notions of society as to what is moral! And what a honeycombing of scepticism does it not betray in our modern world as to the real standard of right and wrong! Then there is another curious circumstance about the dramatists of the Tudor and Stuart period. They furnish but a very slight reflection of the theological and political strifes of the times. It has even been maintained that Shakspeare was a Roman Catholic, and entirely as the proof fails, it is sufficiently suggestive that the attempt to prove him one should ever have been made. No doubt the chief actors in London being the "King's players," or the "Queen's players," they had singularly little liberty for expressing any political sentiments which they might have held. How little that liberty was, may be gathered from one of the few adventures that chequered the life of George Chapman. In conjunction with Ben Jonson and Marston he wrote the comedy of Eastward Hoe in the first year of James the First's reign. In this play they indulged in a few of those reflections upon the Scotch, which were then so popular among English people; and "Gentle Jamie," in his wrath, sent all the three poets to the Fleet, where they were very nearly undergoing the characteristic gentle penalty of those days, in having their noses slit. Drummond says that Jonson declared that he had no hand in writing the offending passages, but that he would not desert his friends in their trouble, and went to prison with them. As it was, James, who was more forgiving than is usual with cowards, soon set all three at liberty, and took to admiring Chapman's writings, and made no objection to the patronage which his son Henry Prince of Wales bestowed upon him.

That the king ever saw or heard of the speech in praise of tobacco in the comedy of Monsieur D'Olive, which Chapman wrote soon afterwards, is hardly to be believed. If he did see it, and yet continued his tolerance of the writer, or allowed it to be acted, only proves that his hatred of tobacco was less deep than his fondness for the Scotch. The speech

is so amusing in itself, and so characteristic of Chapman when he was in his comic vein, that we must extract it as it stands, only taking the liberty of spelling it as people now spell. The editor of the present edition, on the contrary, has preserved the spelling of 1606, a proceeding which will by no means tend to popularise the poet with modern readers, and strikes as not a little pedantic. There is good reason for retaining the original spelling of Chaucer, for his English was not our English; and there are philological reasons which forbid the modernising of his spelling as a barbarism. But there is no more reason for spelling Chapman otherwise than as we spell the language which he wrote, than for performing the same operation with Shakspeare. For the same reason, is there not a little pedantry in printing the title-page of the book without any punctuation whatever, as if it were a Latin inscription eighteen hundred years old? Here, however, is Monsieur D'Olive in modern trim, deserving, in these days of illuminated quotations, to be hung up in the smoking-room of every club in London.

"Tobacco," says he, "that excellent plant, the use whereof (as of fifth element) the world cannot want, is that little shop of nature, wherein her whole workmanship is abridged, where you may see earth kindled into fire, the fire breathe out an exhalation, which entering in at the mouth walks through the regions of a man's brain, drives out all ill vapours, but itself draws down all bad humours by the mouth, which in time might breed a scab over the whole body, if indeed they have not; a plant of singular use, for on the one side, nature being an enemy to vacuity and emptiness, and on the other, there being so many empty brains in the world as there are, how shall nature's course be continued? How shall these empty brains be filled, but with air, nature's instrument for that purpose? If with air, what so proper as your fume? what fume so healthful as your perfume? what perfume so sovereign as tobacco? Besides the excellent edge it gives a man's wit (as they can best judge that have been present at a feast of tobacco, where commonly all good wits are consorted), what variety of discourse it begets! What sparks of wit it yields it is a world to hear . . . For garlick, I will not say, because it is a plant of our own country, but it may cure the diseases of the country, but for the diseases of the Court, they are out of the element of garlick to medicine. To conclude, as there is no enemy to garlick but tobacco, so there is no friend to garlick but a sheep's head; and so I conclude."

Another notable characteristic of the early dramatists is their almost complete abstinence from the religious conflicts which were waging all around them. Those conflicts were never lulled. The ferocity of the antagonism between Protestant and Catholic was succeeded by a bitterness, almost fiercer still, between the Puritan and the Anti-Puritan. As the country gradually attained prosperity under Elizabeth, and remained prosperous under James, the hatreds of the two parties entered more and more into the social and family life of the people. To the vast mass of

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