One peculiarity of the Spanish plays makes it safe to recommend them even _virginibus puerisque_,--they are never unclean. Even Milton would have approved a censorship of the press that accomplished this. It is a remarkable example of how sharp the contradiction is between the private morals of a people and their public code of morality. Certain things may be done, but they must not seem to be done. I have said nothing of the earlier Italian Drama because it has failed to interest me. But Italy had indirectly a potent influence, through Spenser, in supplying English verse till it could answer the higher uses of the stage. The lines--for they can hardly be called verses--of the first attempts at regular plays are as uniform, flat, and void of variety as laths cut by machinery, and show only the arithmetical ability of their fashioners to count as high as ten. A speech is a series of such laths laid parallel to each other with scrupulous exactness. But I shall have occasion to return to this topic in speaking of Marlowe. Who, then, were the Old English Dramatists? They were a score or so of literary bohemians, for the most part, living from hand to mouth in London during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century and the first thirty years of the seventeenth, of the personal history of most of whom we fortunately know little, and who, by their good luck in being born into an unsophisticated age, have written a few things so well that they seem to have written themselves. Poor, nearly all of them, they have left us a fine estate in the realm of Faery. Among them were three or four men of genius. A comrade of theirs by his calling, but set apart from them alike by the splendor of his endowments and the more equable balance of his temperament, was that divine apparition known to mortals as Shakespeare. The civil war put an end to their activity. The last of them, in the direct line, was James Shirley, remembered chiefly for two lines from the last stanza of a song of his in “The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,” which have become a proverb:-- “Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.” It is a nobly simple piece of verse, with the slow and solemn cadence of a funeral march. The hint of it seems to have been taken from a passage in that droningly dreary book the “Mirror for Magistrates.” This little poem is one of the best instances of the good fortune of the men of that age in the unconscious simplicity and gladness (I know not what else to call it) of their vocabulary. The language, so to speak, had just learned to go alone, and found a joy in its own mere motion, which it lost as it grew older, and to walk was no longer a marvel.