nanimity in authorship as in everything else. His ambition seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever contemplated the possibility of being read by after ages. What a slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman. Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

If I were to be consulted as to a Reprint of our Old English Dramatists, I should advise to begin. with the collected Plays of Heywood. He was a fellow Actor, and fellow Dramatist, with Shakspeare. He possessed not the imagination of the latter; but in all those qualities which gained for Shakspeare the attribute of gentle, he was not inferior to him. Generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depths of passion; sweetness, in a word, and gentleness; Christianism; and true hearty Anglicism of feelings, shaping that Christianism; shine throughout his beautiful writings in a manner more conspicuous than in those of Shakspeare, but only more conspicuous, inasmuch as in Heywood these qualities are primary, in the other subordinate to poetry. I love them both equally, but Shakspeare has most of my wonder. Heywood should be known to his countrymen, as he deserves. His plots are almost invariably English. I am sometimes jealous, that Shakspeare laid so few of his scenes at home. I laud Ben Jonson, for that in one instance having framed the first draught of Every Man in His Humour in Italy, he changed the scene, and Anglicised his characters. The names of

them in the First Edition, may not be unamusing, e.g., Lorenzo, Sen., and Guilliana.

How say you, Reader? do not Master Kitely, Mistress Kitely, Master Knowell, Brainworm, &c. read better than these Cisalpines?

Ulania, a female Bee, confesses her passion for Miletus, who loves Arethusa.

....

As we have sat at work, both of one Rose.

Prettily pilfered from the sweet passage in the Midsummer Night's Dream, where Helena recounts to Hermia their schooldays' friendship.

We, Hermia, like two artificial Gods, &c.

From the Rewards of Virtue. A Comedy. By JOHN FOUNTAΙΝ.

While she, from whose so unaffected tears

His laurel sprung, for ever dwells unknown.

Is it possible that Cowper might have remembered this sentiment in his description of the advantages which the world, that scorns him, may derive from the noiseless hours of the contemplative man?

Perhaps she owes

Her sunshine and her rain, &c.—Task.

The Seven Champions of Christendom. By JOHN KIRK.-Calib the Witch, in the opening scene, in a

storm

"But 'tis my fiend-begotten and deformed issue."

A sort of young Caliban, her son, who presently enters complaining of a bloody coxcomb which the young St. George had given him.

Two Tragedies in One, &c.

Why shed you tears? this deed is but a Play.

The whole theory of the reason of our delight in Tragic Representations, which has cost so many

elaborate chapters of criticism, is condensed in these last four lines-Aristotle quintessentialised.

From the English Monsieur. By HOWARD.-The Monsieur comforts himself when his mistress rejects him, that "'twas a denial with a French tone of voice "-so that 'twas agreeable: and at her first departure" Do you see, sir, how she leaves us. She walks away with a French step."

"The Traitor." Tragedy by J. SHIRLEY (After a specimen):-My transcript breaks off here. Perhaps what follows was of less value: or perhaps I broke off, as I own I have sometimes done, to leave in my readers a relish and an inclination to explore for themselves the genuine fountains of the old dramatic delicacies.

Dedication to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess.

Lest you incur their censure.

He damns the town: the town before damned him.

We can almost be not sorry for the ill dramatic success of this play, which brought out such spirited apologies in particular the masterly definitions of Pastoral and Tragi-comedy in the Preface.

Nor instance nor excuse: of what they do,

Instead of mournful plaint, our chorus sings.

So I point it; instead of the line, as it stands in this unique copy :

Nor instance, nor excuse for what they do.

The sense I take to be, what the common playwrights do (or show by action-the "inexplicable dumb show" of Shakspeare)-our chorus relates. The lines that follow have else no coherence.

King John.-Where Bruce says, "Prefer a Benefit," i..., of peace; which this monstrous act of John's in this play comes to counteract, in the same way as the discovered death of Prince Arthur is like to break the composition of the king with his barons in Shakspeare's play.

SONG IN GEORGE PEELE'S DRAMATIC PASTORAL "THE ARRAIGNMENT OF PARIS," 1584

TO MY ESTeemed friend, and excellenT MUSICIAN VN, ESQ.

Dear Sir, I conjure you in the name of all the Sylvan deities, and of the Muses, whom you honour, and they reciprocally love and honour you,-rescue this old passionate ditty-the very flower of an old forgotten pastoral, which had it been in all parts equal, the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher had been but a second name in this sort of writing-rescue it from the profane hands of every common composer: and in one of your tranquillest moods, when you have most leisure from those sad thoughts, which sometimes unworthily beset you; yet a mood, in itself not unallied to the better sort of melancholy; laying by for once the lofty organ, with which you shake the Temples attune, as to the pipe of Paris himself, some milder and more love-according instrument, this pretty courtship between Paris and his (then-notas-yet-forsaken) Enone. Oblige me, and all more knowing judges of music and of poesy, by the adaptation of fit musical numbers, which it only wants to be the rarest love dialogue in our language.

Your implorer,

C. L.

SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, THE CHURCH HISTORIAN.

THE writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint, and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his wit is not always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty of surprising; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.

As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought it might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I shall arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts, without