it was published in 1556, and Mary died in 1558. A vindication of "the maid with the broom" might be equally unwelcome to "spiders and flies." How it happened that the court jester who has sent forth such volumes of mirth could have kept for years hammering at a dull and dense poem, is a literary problem which perhaps admits of a solution. We may ascribe this aberration of genius to the author's position in society. Heywood was a Romanist from principle; that he was no bigot, his free satires on vulgar superstitions attest. But the jester at times was a thoughtful philosopher. One of his interludes is _The Play of the Weather_, where the ways of Providence are vindicated in the distribution of the seasons. But "mad, merry Heywood" was the companion of many friends--Papists and Protestants--at court and in all the world over. His creed was almost whole in broken times, perhaps agreeing a little with the Protestant, and then reverting to the Romanist. In this unbalanced condition, mingling the burlesque with the solemn, unwilling to excommunicate his friend the Protestant "spider," and intent to vindicate the Romanist "fly;" often he laid aside, and often resumed, his confused emotions. It might require dates to settle the precise allusions; what he wrote under Henry and Edward would be of another colour than under the Marian rule. His gaiety and his gravity offuscate one another; and the readers of his longsome fiction, or his dark parallel, were puzzled, even among his contemporaries, to know in what sense to receive them. Sympathising with "the fly," and not uncourteous to "the spider," our author has shown the danger of combining the burlesque with the serious; and thus it happened that the most facetious genius could occupy twenty years in compounding, by fits and starts, a dull poem which neither party pretended rightly to understand. FOOTNOTES: [1] One of these interludes has been recently published by the Camden Society, under the skilful editorship of Mr. Collier, from a manuscript corrected by Bale himself in the Devonshire collection--it is entitled "Kynge Johan," [and founded on events in his reign, made subservient to the ultra-protestantism of Bale.] Others have been printed in the "Harleian Collection," vol. i.; and in Dodsley's "Old English Drama." [2] That is, proverbs with humorous answers to them. See the "Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue," by Mr. Payne Collier, of Lord Francis Egerton's "Library of Early English Literature," p. 2. [3] Dodsley's "Old Plays," vol. i. ROGER ASCHAM.