that if it does, that is the fault of people who read it, not the fault of poetry itself. He pointed out that, on the contrary, poetry has often encouraged men to noble deeds for instance, the tales of King Arthur in England. Homer's heroes have stirred people to imitate them. Sidney himself was fired with a love of battle by the ballad of Chevy Chase.

23. Soon after his marriage with the daughter of the English ambassador, with whom he had lived in Paris, Sidney (now Sir Philip, for the queen had knighted him), with his old school friend Greville, planned to set out to America to fight against the Spaniards. The queen would not permit this; but soon afterwards, when the Earl of Leicester was sent to help the Dutch to fight against the Spaniards, Sidney went with him. While he was in the Netherlands, both his father and mother died, and soon afterwards their brave son followed them. He was helping to defend the town of Zutphen when he was shot in the knee.

24. No doubt you all know the story of his unselfishness in giving up the precious draught of water to a dying soldier who lay near him, and who looked at it with longing eyes. After lingering a few days, preparing himself for the death from which even the most careful nursing could not save him, Sir Philip died. The news of his death caused the greatest grief in England. The queen and court wore mourning for many months, and whole volumes of poems were written lamenting his early death—among them, two poems by Spenser, called Astrophel and The Ruins of Time; one by the Countess of Pembroke; and another by King James of Scotland.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

1. One of the new forms of literature in Queen Elizabeth's time, and one for which the age is most noted, is the drama or play. Until that time there had been no English plays of

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the ordinary kind. Greek and Latin plays were often acted at the universities and great boys' schools, and in the churches Latin Miracle Plays were acted. Very strange these must have been, if we may judge of the performances of a miracle play which is acted every few years at a place in Germany—plays in which characters from Scripture appeared along with the devil, who was always the comic character. Such events as the Entry of our Saviour into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and Betrayal, the Crucifixion, and the Entombment, were acted on the stage.

2. After a time allegories or Moralities, in which vices and virtues spoke and walked about as people, were acted in English in the markets or open spaces of the town by the trades-people. But the first English play of the ordinary kind was written, probably for the boys of Eton, by one of their masters, Nicholas Udall. Very likely the boys acted it as they sometimes do Greek and Latin plays on breaking-up days still, and plenty of fun would they get out of the rehearsals; for the play was a comedy, showing the scrapes into which a young Londoner, Ralph Roister Doister, is led by his conceit and boasting. The play, called from the name of the hero, was probably written about 1541; and some twenty years afterwards the first English tragedy was written by two London barristers, Sackville and Norton.

3. The story of Gorboduc (so the play was called) is taken from the old chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Gorboduc, King of Britain, has divided his kingdom between his sons Ferrex and Porrex. The sons quarrel, and the younger kills the elder brother. The elder son is his mother's favourite, so the mother in revenge kills the younger son. The people, enraged at this cruelty, murder the father and mother, and the nobles of the country fall upon the rebel people and destroy them. There is then a dispute about the crown, and civil war arises, in which both the nobles and their children are slain. For long, the country is almost desolate, being wasted by war and disorder. Perhaps in this play, so full of murder, Sackville and Norton meant to show England how foolish it is

for people of the same nation to disagree; for at that time there was much disagreement in England. The play was acted twice-once at the Christmas festivities in the Inner Temple, and again before the queen and her court at Whitehall Palace.

4. After that it soon became the fashion to write and act English plays at the universities and the law courts; and great noblemen like the Earl of Leicester had their own companies of actors attached to their households. There were as yet no theatres, and plays were acted in some such place as the yard of an inn, the audience either standing in the yard or sitting in the galleries which ran around it. The scenery was of the simplest kind, often only the furniture from the inn itself; and the play was performed in the afternoon, not in the evening, as is usual now.

5. The first great play - writer of Elizabeth's time was CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. His plays were neither in prose nor in rhyme, but in the new kind of verse introduced, you may remember, by the Earl of Surrey from Italy the unrhymed verse of ten syllables called blank verse. Marlowe's plays were chiefly tragedies. The greatest was The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. There were many stories in Germany about this Dr. Faustus, who was said to be a German magician who lived in the sixteenth century. These stories had been translated into English, French, and Dutch. Marlowe, however, shows Faustus as a scholar so eager for knowledge that he sells his soul to the devil, so as to get the knowledge he wants. He paints very strongly and earnestly the struggle between the doctor's conscience and the evil spirits who tempt him.

6. Marlowe might have lived to write many plays even better than Faustus, had he not been killed in a tavern-house quarrel when he was still a young man. There were other play-wrights at the time; but two died about the same time as Marlowe, and two left off writing, so that there might have been a scarcity of good plays, had not a new dramatist appeared-one, too, who was to be the glory of the English stage. He was the famous WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, of whom, doubtless, most of you have heard.

Malliain Shakyseli

7. We know very little about Shakespeare's life. He was the eldest living child of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker of Stratford-on-Avon, an old-fashioned country town in Warwickshire. If you ever visit the place, you will see the house where the poet was born in 1564, it is said on the 23rd of April. Will was probably a school-boy at the Free Grammar School; for, besides English, his friend Ben Jonson says he knew "small Latin and less Greek." Until the boy was fourteen, his father was a prosperous man, having besides his business, or perhaps instead of it, a little farm where he kept some sheep. For a while he was alderman; and when players came to Stratford, as we know they did, the lad would likely be taken to see them play, and might meet some of the players at his father's house.

8. Perhaps the lad would begin to think it a fine thing to dress up as a king or a soldier and speak finely-sounding words before a crowd of people (boys usually do until they have a chance of trying it). When his father lost his money, and the

lad could get no definite work, not being apprenticed as boys generally were, Shakespeare seems to have fallen into idle habits. He made the foolish mistake of marrying very young—when he was only eighteen. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was the daughter of a farmer near Stratford. She was eight years older than her husband. For four years the young couple struggled with poverty at Stratford. Shakespeare's father could not help them, as he himself was deeply in debt.

9. At last the young husband and father seems to have bethought him of his early taste for acting, and determined to go to London, seek out his friends among the actors who had visited Stratford, and earn a livelihood for himself, his wife, and their three children. He could not take them with him, not being sure of work; and, besides, he may have thought the open fields and gardens of Stratford a better nursery for his little girl Susanna and the twin-babies Hamnet and Judith than the close, unhealthy streets of London. So off Will set alone to London to find a fortune, just as many a youth had done before him, and as many a one has done since. We do not know what he found to do at first; perhaps whatever he could get holding horses, or doing little odd jobs about the theatre; but he seems to have persevered and done these little things so well that soon better work came to him. It was still humble enough-acting small parts at the Blackfriars Theatre, or writing up other writers' old or bad plays.

10. At last he began to think he might write as good plays. as these, and very soon showed that he could write far better ones than most of them. The first he wrote were comedies; but even in these we see the truth and the genius that afterwards were displayed more plainly in his tragedies and historical plays. Each of his many plays has a purpose—even the comedies, which you might think were meant only to amuse. But if you look at the Midsummer-Night's Dream, beneath all the fun and frolic of the fairies, and the absurdity of the Athenian players, Bottom the weaver and his company, you may find this lesson, that even the humblest work of nature is far, far better than a great deal of art. How gracefully and prettily