which have all the innocence of the Old Age in them. Otherwise he is naught. I say this for the benefit of the young, for in my own callow days I took him seriously because the Rev. Alexander Dyce had edited him, and I endured much in trying to reconcile my instincts with my superstition. He it was that called Shakespeare “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers,” as if any one could have any use for feathers from such birds as he, except to make pens of them. He was the cause of the dulness that was in other men, too, and human nature feels itself partially avenged by this stanza of an elegy upon him by one “R. B.,” quoted by Mr. Dyce:-- “Greene is the pleasing object of an eye; Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him; Greene is the ground of every painter’s dye; Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him; Nay, more, the men that so eclipsed his fame Purloyned his plumes; can they deny the same?” Even the libeller of Shakespeare deserved nothing worse than this! If this is “R. B.” when he was playing upon words, what must he have been when serious? Another dramatist whom we can get on very well without is George Peele, the friend and fellow-roisterer of Greene. He, too, defied the inspiring influence of the air he breathed almost as successfully as his friend. But he had not that genius for being dull all the time that Greene had, and illustrates what I was just saying of the manner in which the most tiresome of these men waylay us when we least expect it with some phrase or verse that shines and trembles in the memory like a star. Such are:-- “For her I’ll build a kingly bower Seated in hearing of a hundred streams”; and this, of God’s avenging lightning,-- “At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, Sit ever burning in his hateful bones.” He also wrote some musically simple stanzas, of which I quote the first two, the rather that Thackeray was fond of them:-- “My golden locks Time hath to silver turned (O Time too swift, and swiftness never ceasing), My youth ’gainst age, and age at youth hath spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing. Beauty, strength, and youth, flowers fading been; Duty, faith, and love, are roots, and ever green. “My helmet now shall make an hive for bees, And lover’s songs shall turn to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, that are old age’s alms. But though from court to cottage I depart, My saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.” There is a pensiveness in this, half pleasurable, half melancholy, that has a charm of its own.