men detested both the poet and the king. And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the degradation of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur passages of the old sweetness and grandeur; _disjecta membra poetæ_ such as these, which, even although addressed to James, are perfect:— ‘3_rd_ _Gipsy_. Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame, Take up land sounds upon their purple wings, And, catching each from other, bear the same To every angle of their sacred springs. So will we take his praise, and hurl his name About the globe, in thousand airy rings.’ * * * * Let us pass on. Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit? There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here, and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible. The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy’s expense, in ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women’s parts acted by boys. Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked nevertheless. What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans is hard to conceive. Prynne, in his ‘Histriomastix,’ may have pushed a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses’ law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that, therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a similar practice would produce a similar evil. Our firm conviction is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty certainly to send him to the devil. Let any man of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy’s mind which would be produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in almost every play. We appeal to common sense—would any father allow his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of mankind? And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving. The Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters than Terence’s on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes? Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere defilement of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but that, from collateral evidence, we believe every