{83} _Defects in the Drama_. It should be remembered that this was written when the English drama was but twenty years old, and Shakespeare, aged about seventeen, had not yet come to London. The strongest of Shakespeare’s precursors had not yet begun to write for the stage. Marlowe had not yet written; and the strength that was to come of the freedom of the English drama had yet to be shown. {84} There was no scenery on the Elizabethan stage. {85} Messenger. {86} From the egg. {87} _Bias_, slope; French “bìais.” {88} Juvenal, _Sat._ iii., lines 152–3. Which Samuel Johnson finely paraphrased in his “London:” “Of all the griefs that harass the distrest, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.” {89} George Bachanan (who died in 1582, aged seventy-six) had written in earlier life four Latin tragedies, when Professor of Humanities at Bordeaux, with Montaigne in his class. {90} _Defects in Lyric Poetry_. {91} _Defects in Diction_. This being written only a year or two after the publication of “Euphues,” represents that style of the day which was not created but represented by the book from which it took the name of “Euphuism.” {92} Nizolian paper-books, are commonplace books of quotable passages, so called because an Italian grammarian, Marius Nizolius, born at Bersello in the fifteenth century, and one of the scholars of the Renaissance in the sixteenth, was one of the first producers of such volumes. His contribution was an alphabetical folio dictionary of phrases from Cicero: “Thesaurus Ciceronianus, sive Apparatus Linguæ Latinæ e scriptis Tullii Ciceronis collectus.” {93} “He lives and wins, nay, comes to the Senate, nay, comes to the Senate,” &c. {94} Pounded. Put in the pound, when found astray. {95} _Capacities of the English Language_. {96} _Metre and Rhyme_. {97} _Last Summary and playful peroration_.