and this temper, literature--first, classical literature and then the vernacular literature produced under the stimulus of it--was of supreme importance, and the drama was perhaps the most important form of literature. The value of literature for those who were then trying to transform the world, to rebuild it and themselves nearer to the heart's desire, was of course best recognized by the finest spirits of the age, men like Erasmus, Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney. But it seems to have been felt, though in cruder ways, even by the vulgar. An amusing illustration of this is the little record kept by old Simon Forman, a noted mountebank and quack doctor, in 1610 and 1611. It has preserved for us our earliest notices of performances of _Macbeth_, _Cymbeline_, and _A Winter's Tale_; but this is accidental. The doctor's intention was merely to note for his own guidance such lessons as he learned from the plays presented on the stage. Such benefits were, according to the views of wiser men, to be gained chiefly from comedies; tragedy, and classical tragedy in particular, had a finer, a more permanent value. Tragedy was the voice of the wisest men of the world, the ancients, upon the most serious themes of human life; it not only, as Aristotle had said, purified the mind through pity and terror, it fortified the inner life, and both by example and by sententious maxim prepared man to meet the most subtle attacks of fate, the temptations of success, or the discouragements of failure. Tragedy therefore had a unique value for the Elizabethans, and the performances of classical plays, or those written in imitation of the classics, by the universities or the inns of court, did not fall into the abyss which now receives amateur theatricals.