The first heirs of this new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this collection of the school,--left to show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends us most--belongs properly to this collection; contains _this_ secret, which is the Elizabethan secret, and the secret of that art of delivery and tradition which this from the first inevitably created,--yet rude and undeveloped, but _there_. We need not go so far, however, as that, in this not pleasant retrospect; for these early plays are not the ones to which the interpreter of this school would choose to refer the reader, for the proof of its claims at present;--these which the faults of youth and the faults of the time conspire to mar: in which the overdoing of the first attempt to hide under a cover suited to the tastes of the Court, or to the yet more faulty tastes of the rabble of an Elizabethan play-house,--the boldest scientific treatment of 'the forbidden questions,' still leaves so much upon the surface of the play that repels the ordinary criticism;--these that were first sent out to bring in the rabble of that age to the scholar's cell, these in which the new science was first brought in, in its slave's costume, with all its native glories shorn, and its eyes put out 'to make sport' for the Tudor--perilous sport!--these first rude essays of a learning not yet master of its unwonted tools, not yet taught how to wear its fetters gracefully, and wreathe them over and make immortal glories of them--still clanking its irons. There is nothing here to detain any criticism not yet instructed in the secret of this Art Union. But the faults are faults of execution merely; _the design_ of the Novura Organum is not more noble, not more clear.