Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing Vortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already. But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of _The British Princes_ is before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly runs: _Which from this island's foes his grandsire won_. Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries. The _Usurper_ is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, "a most perfidious villain," plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last, much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L. Stevenson, "There's an end of that." But though the _Usurper_ is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier lees of wit in the _Carnival_, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little thing interesting to a modern student. The _Carnival_ has one such peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's _Churchyard Elegy_. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and counter-marches of the Civil War. But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in our volume really repays us for pushing on so far. Here is a piece of wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of Newcastle's _Humorous Lovers_: _At curfew-time, and at the dead of night, I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright, Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo To darker caves and solitary woods, To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods; I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe, Blasted with cursèd droppings of mildew; Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans; The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, And how thy want of love did murder me; And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near, Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear_.