the unfilial son and the profligate wife, but the scene, as a forensic representation, is crude, lacks detail, and displays none of that pomp of justice which all courts of any dignity exhibit.

The affiliation between the disciples of Themis and Thespis was a marked feature of those times. Many students of law forsook it and became dramatists. So common was this transition that Greene, in his Groat's Worth of Wit, published before 1593, in a passage which has been thought to reflect directly upon Shakespeare, speaks of these re-enforcements to the play-writers as those "who have left the trade of Noverint," (know all men, etc.) Sir Christopher Hatton wrote a play entitled Tancred and Gismund, and afterwards became lord chancellor. So noteworthy were these accessions from the law students that Ben Jonson begins the Poetaster, in which he lampoons a rival dramatist and the lawyers, with a scene between Ovid and his father, who detects the young law student writing plays and poems.

There is so much similarity between the opening lines of the Poetaster

Then when this body falls in funeral fire, My name shall live and my best part aspire, and Shakespeare's assertion of undying fame in the sonnet

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

that one is tempted to conjecture that Jonson intended to impersonate Shakespeare in Ovid; but the alluring supposition is too fanciful, for we know from Ovid himself that

Sæpe pater dixit, studium quid inutile tendes,
Mæonides nullas ipse reliquit opes.

Non me verbosas leges discere, non me
Ingrato voces prostituisse foro.

John Shakespeare, coming to London, and detecting his son in the composition of plays, would have been a far better theme for an imaginary conversation than Landor chose when he gave us the examination of William Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing.

Henry Wriothesly, to whom Shakespeare dedicated "the first heir of his invention," was the grandson of a common-law lawyer, who was lord chancellor from 1544 to 1547.

The relations of the most dramatic profession of

real life to that which mimics life was then much like the construction of the amphitheater of Curio, which was elliptical, but built in equal sections, which could be revolved so that each became a theater, displaying a different spectacle, but could be turned in a moment into the unity of the original shape, and confuse two representations and two audiences. The inns of court were the scenes of spectacular dramas of great magnificence, the expenses of which were borne by the lawyers. These revels, as they were called, laid the best dramatic genius under contribution, and, though they have long since ended, the ancient sympathy has survived the insubstantial pageants and the actors, which have melted into thin air.

It is not difficult to account for this intimacy. The dramatists of that time were unquestionably the most brilliant men who ever lived together in one city. Intellectual society was limited. The physicians have left no memorials. The stage was abhorred by the clergy. The editor was yet to come. But there was the bar, whose members knew life and human nature as they are, and who played their parts in all their real comedies and trage

dies; university men, ripe and sweet with all classical learning, cynical and humorous, tainted with no cant. The taverns were the clubs. And thus it was that the most cultivated scholarship and the most brilliant imaginations of England met in encounters, which kindled into conflagrations of wit, humor, learning, ribaldry, and wisdom.

There was everything in that romantic age to stir the imagination. There was a spirit of chivalry abroad which marched in quest of something more substantial than mouldy relics, and fulfilled vows sworn to something grander than the achievement of pious absurdities. Frobisher had sailed northward into the silence of the eternal seas of ice. El Dorado lifted against the western skies its shafts and domes of gold. The Armada had vanished like a portentous phantom, smitten by the valor of Englishmen, and chased far off into the Hebridean fogs by the waves of the exasperated sea, which fought for its island nursling. Hawkins, pirate and admiral, had thrown his fortune into the pit which threatened to swallow up his country, and had died under the displeasure of his stingy yet mag

nificent queen. Raleigh, having seen his dreams of the new world die out, lay in the Tower, writing his history, doubtless smoking the consoling weed, while awaiting the end of so much bravery, so much rashness, and so many cares, in the summons of "eloquent, just, and mighty Death." Drake had spoiled the seas and the cities thereof. Captain John Smith had told of great empires in the west, and their swarthy emperors. Mary, Queen of Scots, that changeful enchantress, as we see her now, at one time the French lily, all sweet, and pure, and fragrant; and again the Scottish thistle, spinous and cruel to all who touched her,-had woven the cords of love into the chains of empire, and had pressed the cup of her sorceries to the lips of many men, until her own glorious head bowed to the long divorce of steel.

History, among all the women who have been crowned with the thorns of sorrow, presents no figure of which Shakespeare could have made so much. But what could any dramatist do for her in the life-time of Elizabeth, or in that of the pu sillanimous and unfilial Sawney who succeeded her?

A reverend church had been subverted through