=Literary Estimate.=--In the extant plays from 1550 to 1580 love has but a subordinate part. In _Alexander and Campaspe_, however, as in all the Lyly comedies, the central idea is that of nearly all the great plays of the Elizabethan drama--the love of man for woman. Doubtless the subject appealed to Lyly especially because in the self-abnegation of Alexander the Queen might choose to see a compliment to her final position toward Leicester and the Countess of Essex. Diogenes he used in order to get comic relief. That Lyly's comedies are comparatively free from vulgarity is probably because they were given by children before the Queen and her ladies. Possibly the youth of the actors is the reason for the absence of strong emotional expression, but it is more probable that the temperament of the author is responsible. It is hard to believe that a dramatist who felt keenly emotional possibilities in his material could have passed by Timoclea so rapidly, for in Plutarch she has all the requisites of the heroine in a Beaumont and Fletcher play. Nor would such a dramatist have made so little of the struggle of Alexander between infatuation and the desire to regain his accustomed self-command. Lyly's position toward his work is like that of the early writers of chronicle-history plays. He does not depend on selecting the most characteristic situations and speeches, on supplying missing motives, on unification of material which history has passed down in somewhat disordered fashion, but on repeating as many as possible of the situations and speeches associated with the names. Like those writers, too, he makes no attempt to get behind his material, to see its interrelations and its dramatic significance as a whole.