These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an artless mode, which however long

poems, are perfectly harmonious, and the songs are racy and joyous.

continued to be the practice of our comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in his periodical paper, "The Lover," condemned it as no better a device than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in this identical paper an old bachelor is called "Wildgoose," and the presumed author of "The Lover" is Marmaduke "Myrtle." Anstey has made the most happy use of characteristic names in the Bath Guide, which is an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever an author's judgment equals the felicity of his in

vention.

Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity :-so true it is that the familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read, or chanted, is a metre which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined

to have been within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries, whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has, therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also, that the very measure of this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the decasyllablic measure have called it "a long hobbling metre," has been actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with the design of reviving rhymed comedy

The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men. This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer's name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College, was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle prepared by a scrivener's hand, for our gay amorists then could not always com* Hayley.

pose, if they could write their billets-doux, being maliciously read to the lady, by purposely neglecting the punctuation, turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson in his "Art of Logic," gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation, in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we may have "a double sense and contrary meaning." He fortunately added that his example was "taken out of an interlude made by NICHOLAS UDALL."

This was the learned UDALL, the master of Eton School; and this very comedy had been so universally admired, that "Roister-Doister" became a proverbial phrase, to designate a hare-brained coxcomb. We now possess two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English people in rural and in city life, by two contemporaries, who wanted not the art of "holding the mirror up to nature."

THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.

THE establishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the "children" or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country till an act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies, classing them with " rogues and vagabonds." Throughout the kingdom there was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments-it was the national anticipation of a public theatre.

If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester *, "to exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation

* This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.-Annals of the Stage, i. 211.