to see a pretty girl, It is a world to see her whirl Dancing in a round, than to observe the gyrations of the terrestrial globe. In "Hickscorner," an interlude of the same kind, the hero has been in as many places as Widsith himself, including the land of Rumbelow Three mile out of hell. Hickscorner and Free Will are worse roisterers than Humanity, and their rude waggeries make the mirth, though Free Will speaks of forswearing sack and living cleanly. Heywood. John Heywood is one of the few known authors of these things; he was of what is now Pembroke College, Dr. Johnson's College, in Oxford, and was an acquaintance of Sir Thomas More, who frankly admits that by nature he was "a giglot," a gay fellow, though, by grace, devout. Heywood was merry in mournful times, when Henry VIII began to make martyrs of Protestants, and of Catholics who were not, at any moment, of the same shade of belief as himself. The anecdotes say that Heywood saved his skin by his jests, that after Henry's death he amused Mary Tudor, who was not easily amused, and that he fled from persecution under Edward VI, and died abroad in the reign of Elizabeth. His best-known piece is "The Four P's," a Pothecary, Pardoner, Palmer, and Pedlar. Why, asks the Pardoner, should the Palmer visit hundreds of remote shrines, while the Pardoner, at his very door, can sell him forgiveness of sins at the lowest figure? He can cleanse a thousand souls for as small a sum as the Palmer spends on one voyage. All four men are impudent rogues, and all, in the spirit of the Morality, are rapidly converted; the Pedlar becoming as pious as Piers Plowman. There is no action, and the great jest is that, in a lying competition, the Pedlar says that he has never seen "a woman out of patience". The diversion must have been derived mainly from the antics of the players on the stage. Heywood's "Thersites" (the impudent orator in the "Iliad") was written about 1537, to make mirth for the birth feast of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. Thersites asks Mulciber (Hephæstus) to make him a helmet (sallet) as he made the arms of Achilles. This enables Mulciber to vent many puns on salad; they look like the very first puns ever devised, and occupy two pages. The pun seems to have been a novelty in Tudor England. Thersites is a rough-hewn predecessor of Shakespeare's Pistol. There is much mockery of sacred relics and some buffoonery by way of action. Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses (such a thing, said J. J. Rousseau, very foolishly, would have been useful in the "Odyssey") and Miles, the Knight, ends all with a pious speech. In early Tudor England the drama had sunk many fathoms below the level of the Miracle Plays, such as that of the Shepherds. The rise of the drama, under Elizabeth, is a kind of miracle, like the sculpture of Phidias appearing after the rude art of the artists who worked at Athens before the victories of Marathon and Salamis.