from Lyly, and quite new,--to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama, which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry and passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that we must look for in Greene. His heroics are “comical,” in a sense not designed by the printer of _Alphonsus_. Drawcansir is hardly an exaggeration of that hero, and is incomparably more coherent. His comic scenes have too commonly the air of mere hack work put in to supply parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are mere successions of events frequently unconnected with one another. But in the midst of all is the undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry. All the scenes in his best play, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressingfield is introduced, are charmingly fresh and natural. With more discipline, and no temptation to serve the taste of the time for King Cambyses’ vein, Greene might have been the author of pleasant little plays of a poetic sentimental order written in a charming simple style. [SN: _Peele._] His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by 1598, in a very sordid way. Of his life very little is known except that he was the son of the “clerk” of Christ’s Hospital, that he was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that he was a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect was so solidly founded that he was made the hero of a book of “jests,” which, in fact, are tales of roguery mostly reprinted from older French originals. Peele worked regularly for a company of actors, and no doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Commentators, who have striven hard to prove the unprovable in the history of the Elizabethan Drama, have assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts of _Henry VI._[75] His undoubted plays are--_The Arraignment of Paris_, _The famous Chronicle of King Edward I._, _The Battle of Alcazar_, _The Old Wives’ Tale_, and _David and Fair Bethsabe_. To these may be added _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which is written in the old seven-foot metre, and differs from the others greatly. But custom has assigned it to Peele, who indeed uses the long line elsewhere. Peele was a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer of the same stamp and limitations. What is best in him is the lyric note and the tenderness. The first is well shown in not a few passages of the _Arraignment of Paris_, a somewhat overgrown masque, written for the Court and to flatter Elizabeth; and the second in the _David and Bethsabe_. His chronicle play, _Edward I._, has a certain historical value as illustrating the growth of the class, and it is notorious for the hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor of Castile; while _The Battle of Alcazar_ is interesting in another way, as an