These were the formative days of audiences, and, therefore, the formative days of plays. Sir Henry Wotton, in a letter from which we have just quoted, written to Lord Bacon in 1631, refers to one of these plays called "The Hog hath lost its Pearl." Says this letter: "Now it is strange to hear how sharp-witted the city is; for they will needs have Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord Mayor, be meant by the hog, and the late Lord Treasurer by the pearl." There is no disputing the fact, at least, that the plays we call "Shakespeare's" are cast in a mold by themselves, and have no contemporary exemplar. The student of these days knows the fact that Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Jonson, or any other who wrote in periods that are counted "literature," made no fortunes at their work. That such as this one alluded to by Wotton--and one example will suffice--were what the town ran to see in those days, mere local sketches--{264}lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the actors themselves (were to the popular taste, that is to say), is much easier to conceive than that the "Hamlet" and the "Lear" were to the popular taste. One Dr. Ileywood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes called the "prose Shakespeare") is understood to have produced some two hundred and twenty of this sort of sketches alone; and, possibly, this was the sort of "early essays at dramatic poetry" which Aubrey speaks of: this "the facetious grace in writing that approves his wit" which Chettle assigns to William Shakespeare--mere sketches in silhouette of the town's doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still do in cities, to a popular and local audience. There is some curious testimony on the subject, which looks to that effect. Cartwright, * in his lines on Fletcher, says:= ```"Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies ```I' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies, ```Old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town ```In turned hose, which our fathers called the clown; ```Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call, ```And which made bawdry pass for comical. ```Naturk was all his art: thy vein was free ```As his, but without his scurrility."= * Poems, 1651, p. 273. One Leonard Ditrges--who, Farmer says (in his essay on "The Learning of Shakespeare"), was "a wit of the town" in the days of Shakespeare--wrote some verses laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer says again) "were printed along with a spurious edi{265}tion of Shakespeare" in 1640. In this copy of verses occur such lines as--= ```"Nature only led him, for look thorough ```This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow ```One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate, ```Nor once from vulgar languages translate."=