spontaneous products of English "humanism" in its later phase. The same passionate impulse--in itself so curiously "romantic"--to revitalise classical life and ideals, which prompted Chapman's translation of "Homer, Prince of Poets," is the shaping spirit of this singular tragedy. Its hero, as we have seen, has strayed into the France of the Catholic Reaction from some academe in Athens or in imperial Rome. He is, in truth, far more really a spirit risen from the dead than the materialised _Umbra_ of his brother. His pervasive influence works in all around him, so that nobles and courtiers forget for a time the strife of faction while they linger over some fragrant memory of the older world. Epictetus with his doctrines of how to live and how to die; the "grave Greeke tragedian" who drew "the princesse, sweet Antigone"; Homer with his "unmatched poem"; the orators Demetrius Phalerius and Demades--these and their like cast a spell over the scene, and transport us out of the troubled atmosphere of sixteenth-century vendetta into the "ampler æther," the "diviner air," of "the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome." Thus the two _Bussy_ plays, when critically examined, are seen to be essentially unlike in spite of their external similarity. The plot of the one springs from that of the other; both are laid in the same period and _milieu_; in technique they are closely akin. The diction and imagery are, indeed, simpler, and the verse is of more liquid cadence in _The Revenge_ than in _Bussy D'Ambois_. But the true difference lies deeper,--in the innermost spirit of the two dramas. _Bussy D'Ambois_ is begotten of "the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind" of passion; it throbs with the stress of an over-tumultuous life. _The Revenge_ is the offspring of the meditative impulse, that averts its gaze from the outward pageant of existence, to peer into the secrets of Man's ultimate destiny, and his relation to the "Universal," of which he involuntarily finds himself a part. FREDERICK S. BOAS. FOOTNOTES: