prose, and also for mythological and classical subjects. The names of his undoubted plays are _Alexander and Campaspe_; _Sapho and Phao_; _Endimion, or The Man in the Moon_; _Gallathea_; _Mydas_; _Mother Bombie_; _The Woman in the Moon_; and _Love’s Metamorphosis_. They were written between 1584 and the end of the century. Lyly, as has been said, was no dramatist. His plays do not advance in any coherent story. They rotate or straggle. When, as in _Mother Bombie_, he did attempt to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere confusion. The faults of his style have been made familiar to all the world by Falstaff’s immortal address to Prince Hal: “For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.... There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,” and so on. The antitheses work with the regularity of pistons; there is a steady march past of similes, drawn as often as not from a natural history worthy of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or threes. His humour is of the kind which makes a reader imitate the example of Sancho when he saw his master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope of the Sierra Morena--retire in order to escape the spectacle of a good gentleman making an exhibition of himself. Yet in his grave and poetic moments there is a prim charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight glitter which is attractive. His snatches of song are among the best in an age of lyric poetry. [SN: _Greene._]