ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS.

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in that age of splendour; how the most heterogeneous elements of character and the most incongruous motives of action displayed themselves in a carnival medley of intensely vivid life.

ง.

What distinguished the English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the contrary, they retained an unenviable character for more than common savagery. Cellini speaks of them as questi diavoli_ quelle bestie di quegli Inglesi. Erasmus describes the filth of their houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness, intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but not cruel; luxurious, but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert Dudley. The English then, as now, were great travellers.

D

Young men, not merely of the noble classes, visited the South and returned with the arts, accomplishments, and follies of Italian capitals. A frequent theme for satire was the incongruity of fashions displayed in the dress of travelled dandies, their language mixed of all the dialects of Europe, their aptitude for foreign dissipations. 'We have robbed Greece of gluttony,' writes Stephen Gosson, Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride, France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing.' Nash ascribes the notable increase of drunkenness to habits contracted by the soldiers in their Flemish campaigns. Ascham attributes the new-fangled lewdness of the youth to their sojourn in Venice. But these affectations of foreign vices were only a varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was the life beneath. Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek; drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every township had its gallows; every village its stocks, whippingpost, and pillory. Here and there, heretics were burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill was seldom dry. Sir Henry Sidney, sent to quell the Irish rebels, 'put man, woman, and child to the sword,' after reading the Queen's proclamation. His officers balanced the amusements of pillage or 'having some killing,' with a preference for the latter sport when they felt themselves in humour for the chase.

ENGLISH SOCIETY.

35

Witches and the belief in witches increased; it was a common village pastime to drown old women in the ponds, or to rack and prick them till they made confession of impossible crimes. A coarse freedom prevailed in hock-tide festivals and rustic revels. Lords of Misrule led forth their motley train; girls went a-maying with their lovers to the woods at night; Feasts of Asses and of Fools profaned the sanctuaries ; Christmas perpetuated rites of Woden and of Freya; harvest brought back the pagan deities of animal enjoyment. Men and women who read Plato, or discussed the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes, relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. Fine gentlemen paid fees for the privilege of clanking up and down its aisles in service-time. Dancers and masquers, crowding from the streets outside in all their frippery, would take the Sacrament and then run out to recommence their revels. Men were Papists and Protestants according to the time of day; hearing mass in the morning and sermon in the afternoon, and winding up their Sunday with a farce in some inn-yard. It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this

confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moonlight at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden.

VI.

Such was the society of which our theatre became the mirror. The splendour and ideal beauty of the world which it presented, in contrast with the semibarbarism from which society was then emerging, added imaginative charm to scenic pageants, and raised the fancy of the playwrights to the heavens of poetry. This contrast converted dramatic art into a vivid dream, a golden intuition, a glowing anticipation of man's highest possibilities. The poets were Prosperos. In the dark and unpaved streets of London visions came to them of Florence or Verona, bright with palaces and lucid with perpetual sunlight. The energetic passions which they found in their own breasts and everywhere among the men around them, attained to tragic grandeur in their imaginations. They translated the crude violence, the fanciful eccentricities, the wayward humours of the day, into animated types; and because they kept touch with human nature, their

THE ROMANTIC DRAMA.

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transcripts from the life of their own time are indestructible.

The form assumed by the Drama in England was not accidental; nor was the triumph of the Romantic over the Classic type of art attained without a vigorous struggle. Scholars at the University and purists at the Court, Sidney by his precepts and Sackville by his practice, the translators of Seneca and the imitators of Italian poets, Ben Jonson's learning and Bacon's authority, were unable to force upon the genius of the people a style alien to the spirit of the times and of the race. Between the age of Pericles and the sixteenth century of our era, the stream of time had swept mightily and gathered volume, bearing down. upon its tide the full development of Greek philosophy and Roman law, the rise and fall of Greek and Roman Empires, the birth and progress of Christianity and Islam, the irruption of Teutonic tribes into the community of civilised races, the growth of modern nationalities and modern tongues, the formation and decay of feudalism, the theology of Alexandria, Byzantium, and Paris, the theocratic despotism of the Papal See, the intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages, the mental ferment of the Middle Ages, the revival of scholarship, philosophy, and art in Southern Europe, and, last of all, the revolution which shook Papal Rome and freed the energies of man. How was it possible, after these vital changes in the substance, composition, and direction of the human spirit, that a Drama, representative of the new world, should be built upon the lines of Greek or Græco-Roman precedents? In Italy, under the oppressive weight of humanism, such a revival