But there is another department of art and literature which is put down as a department of '_learning_,' and a most grave and momentous department of it too, in that new scheme of learning which this play is illustrating,--one which will also have to be impersonated in this representation,--one which plays a most important part in the history of this School. It is that which gives it the _power_ it lacks and wants, and in one way or another will have. It is that which makes _an arm_ for it, and a _long_ one. It is that which supplies its hidden _arms_ and _armour_. But neither is this department of learning as it is extant,--as this School finds it prepared to its hands, going to be permitted to escape the searching of this comprehensive satire. There is a 'refined traveller of Spain' haunting the purlieus of this Court, who is just the bombastic kind of person that is wanted to act this part. For this impersonation, too, is historical. There are just such creatures in nature as this. We see them now and then; or, at least, he is not much overdone,--'this child of Fancy,--Don Armado hight.' It is the Old Romance, with his ballads and allegories,--with his old 'lies' and his new arts,--that this company are going to use for their new minstrelsy; but first they will laugh him out of his bombast and nonsense, and instruct him in the knowledge of 'common things,' and teach him how to make poetry out of them. They have him here now, to make sport of him with the rest. It is the fashionable literature,-- the literature that entertains _a court_,--the literature of _a tyranny_, with his gross servility, with his courtly affectations, with his arts of amusement, his 'vain delights,' with his euphuisms, his 'fire-new words,' it is the polite learning, the Elizabethan _Belles Lettres_, that is brought in here, along with that old Dryasdust Scholasticism, which the other two represent, to make up this company. These critics, who turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of _Love's_ Labour's Lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing the ground for the new.