About two-thirds of the plays which were acted at the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres are now lost to us; and this dramatic literature must have been of unusual excellence, unless we are to suppose that the law of the survival of the fittest may be applied to the lives of plays. From the names of extinct dramas, accessible to us in such places as Henslowe's "Diary" or the Stationers' Registers, it may be inferred that the groundwork of many of them consisted either of political or purely social and domestic topics. Domestic tragedy was one of the most popular forms of the drama. In fact the dramatists, in most instances, took the material for their plays from their own and their neighbours' experiences, and all that was uppermost in men's minds was laid hold of by them, and brought upon the stage with only a little transparent concealment. The topical Elizabethan drama, in the plays which have come down to us, viewed from a purely historical standpoint, is a very accurate though not very flattering embodiment of middle-class society in London in the sixteenth century. From it we learn the dangers incurred by the presence of a large class of riotous idlers, discharged soldiers and sailors, over whom the authorities exercised little control; we are given striking descriptions of the London "roughs"; of these "swagging, swearing, drunken, desperate Dicks, that have the stab readier in their hands than a penny in their purses." We read, too, of the games that children played in the streets; of the assembling of the men of fashion and business in St. Paul's; and of the dense crowding of the neighbouring streets at the dinner-hour, when the throng left the cathedral. The conversation that the characters indulge in, apart from the immediate plot, invariably relates to current events. In a play written about the time of the Irish rebellion, one of the characters talks about Ireland in a way that might apply to recent days: "The land gives good increase Of every blessing for the use of man, And 'tis great pity the inhabitants Will not be civil and live under law." Uninteresting and unsavoury as some of the details of the Elizabethan domestic tragedies are, they were often used with an avowedly moral aim, and they had, according to many contemporary accounts, the most salutary effect on evil-doers.[3] It was not more than forty years after Shakespeare's death that Richard Flecknoe, in his "Discourse of the English Stage," comments upon the altered character of the drama: