In England, as in Athens of old, perfect comedy arose gradually out of the personalities of the rude dramatic attempts of an earlier period. Such productions as Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle were mere imperfect attempts at, we may perhaps rather say feelers towards, comedy itself--that drama, the object of which was to caricature, and thus to dissect and apply correctives to, the vices and weaknesses of contemporary society. The genius of Shakespeare was far too exquisitely poetical to qualify him for a task like this; it wanted some one who could use the lancet and scalpel skilfully, but soberly, and who was not liable to be led astray by too much vigour of imagination. Such a one was Ben Jonson, whom we may rightly consider as the father of English comedy. "Bartholomew Fair," first performed at the Hope Theatre, on Bankside, London, on the 31st of October, 1614, is the most perfect and most remarkable example of the truly English comedy, remarkable, among many other things, for the extraordinary number of characters who were brought upon the stage in one piece, and who are all at the same time grouped and individualised with a skill that reminds us of the pictorial triumphs of a Callot or a Hogarth. London life is placed before us in all its more popular forms in one grand tableau, the one in which it would show itself in its more grotesque attitudes; the London citizen, his vain or easy wife, sharpers of every description, and their victims no less varied in character, the petty city officers, all come in for their share of satire. The different groups are distributed so naturally, that it is difficult to say who is the principal character of the piece--and who ever was the principal character in Bartholomew Fair? Perhaps the character of Cokes, the young booby squire from Harrow--for in those times even so near London as Harrow, a young squire was considered to be in all probability but a young country booby--strikes us most. It is said to have been at a later period the favourite character of Charles II. Among the other principal characters of the play are a proctor of the Arches Court named Littlewit, who imagines himself to be a _bel esprit_ of the first order; his wife, and her mother, dame Purecraft, who is a widow; Justice Overdo, a London magistrate, to whose ward, Grace Wellborn, Cokes is affianced in marriage; a zealous Puritan, named Zeal-of-the-land Busy, who is a suitor to the widow Purecraft, herself also a Puritan; Winwife, Busy's rival; and a gamester named Tom Quarlous, who figures as Winwife's friend and companion. All these meet in town, on the morning of the fair, Cokes under the care of a sort of steward or upper servant, named Waspe, who was of a quarrelsome disposition, and separate in groups among the crowd which filled Smithfield and its vicinity, each having their separate adventures, but meeting from time to time, and reassembling at the end. Cokes behaves