In his commentary on _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ in the larger Temple Shakespeare, Professor Gollancz points out the existence of a Pyramus and Thisbe play, discovered by him in a manuscript at the British Museum.[26] This MS. is a Cambridge commonplace book of about 1630, containing poems attributed to Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, though the greater portion of the contents appear to be topical verses and epigrams unsigned. Amongst these is "Tragaedia miserrima Pyrami & Thisbes fata enuncians. Historia ex Publio Ovidio deprompta. Authore N.R." In the margins are written corresponding passages in Latin from Ovid, whose story it follows closely. The play is in blank verse of a poor kind with occasional rhyming couplets. After a prologue begins "Actus Primus and ultimus"; there are only five scenes in all, and the whole is quite short. The characters consist of Iphidius, father of Pyramus; Labetrus, father of Thisbe; their children, the protagonists; their respective servants, Straton and Clitipho; and Casina, "ancilla" or handmaid to Thisbe. There is also "a raging liones from ye woods." The moral of the play, as stated by Iphidius, is that "the erraticall motions in children's actions Must to a regular form by parents be reduc'd." These lines, and others in the play, would gain by being "reduc'd to a regular form." * * * * * Sec. 3. THE FAIRY PLOT Siecles charmants de feerie, Vous avez pour moi mille attraits, Que de fois dans le reverie, Mon coeur vous donne de regrets. Tout ne fut alors que mensonge aimable; Tout n'est plus que realite; Rien n'est si jolie que la fable, Si triste que la verite! * * * * III In _The Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Shakespeare presents a conception of fairy-land as original as that which owes its propagation to Perrault and the other French collectors of fairy-tales; its merits as a popular delineation of the fairy-world are proved by the fact that it has obtained the sanction and approval of tradition, passing almost at once into an accepted literary convention; so that even to-day it is not easy to shake off the inherited impression that the fairies are only what Shakespeare shows them to be. He did not, of course, invent them; he had doubtless both read of them and heard tales of them; but he invested them with a delicate and graceful fancy that has held the popular imagination ever since. Thanks to him, the modern English conception of the fairies is different from the conceptions prevalent in other countries, and infinitely more picturesque and pleasant. As before, it will be convenient to deal first with the names of his characters.