war; like the popular song, to conviviality; and, like the tale, to love; but less discursive, being short, simple, and rapid, originally the song of the dancers.' The chief ballad metres are iambic lines of six and seven feet, and trochaic lines of seven feet, commonly written in two lines, tetrameter and trimeter alternately. Macaulay, Scott, Thackeray, Hood, Bayard Taylor, Saxe, and Holmes are a few of those who have contributed to this department. It was during the period of the Norman oppression that the ballad literature, singing of the outlaw and the forest, took form. Long stored in the memories of the people, it reaches us only in a late edition of the fifteenth century. Chevy Chase, the Nut-brown Maid, and Robin Hood will live forever.

The Drama is an imitation of human life. It is prose or poetry written to be acted, as the word itself signifies. Like the epic proper, it relates to some important event, has a leading character, with some complication of plot, and, for the most part, appears in the form of blank, or heroic, verse. But what the epic narrates as having been done, the drama brings before our eyes by means of dialogue between the actors, aided by stage appliances and directions. Like the oration, it must produce its effect at once, and therefore it must have a higher degree of probability than the romance and a stronger and simpler interest than the epic or novel. Its great work is impersonation, and its merit lies in the vividness of impression. According as it employs itself upon the grave and affecting or upon the light and gay, it divides itself into Tragedy or Comedy. The former in its severer type, leans to a fatal catastrophe, as in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth; in its milder, it allows happy conclusions, thus permitting scope for poetic justice, as in Measure for Measure. Comedy proposes for its object neither great suffering nor great crime, but the decorums of behavior,

the follies, the humors, the slighter vices of the day, which may be censured and laughed at through a tissue of intrigues agreeably unwoven at last. But life is not all tears nor all laughter; and the English drama, true to the complexity of human nature, allows the tragic and the comic elements to be mixed in the same piece.

Both forms should have unity of subject and action. All the incidents must be subservient to one governing effect. All under-plots if there be such, ought to be made to tend toward the principal object, and to conspire in unravelling the main design. The Greeks added the two unities of time and place, the first of which requires that the transactions be capable of occurring within the time ordinarily occupied by the performance of a play, though this rule was early enlarged so as to permit the action to comprehend a whole day; the second, that the scene should never be shifted, but that the action of the play should be continuous to the end, in the place where it is supposed to begin. These rules were demanded by the nature of dramatic exhibition on the Greek stage, where the play went uninterruptedly forward, there being no pauses or intervals, and the stage ever occupied by the actors or the chorus until the conclusion of the whole. But the practice of suspending the spectacle totally between the acts (regularly five) gives more latitude to the imagination, and sets modern dramatists free from the ancient strict confinement. While the curtain is down, the conditions of time and locality may be easily changed without shocking the spectators by improbable circumstances. If the drama is set to music, the parts being sung instead of spoken, we have the Opera; if some parts are spoken and some sung, the Melodrama. Another variety is the Mask; or romantic adventure, with supernatural personages, fairies, giants, etc., as Milton's Comus. This is now out of fashion. Among the recognized varie

ties of comedy are the Genteel and the Low; the Travesty, a mock-heroic; the Farce, restricted to three acts, and representing scenes that are broadly humorous.

The English drama, like the Greek, began in religion. At a time when sermons were not intelligible if preached, and when none but the clergy could read the stories of the Christian faith, it was introduced by the Church, to instruct the illiterate in saintly or Scriptural history — the only history then known—and to extend her influence by engrossing the sources of popular recreation. Priests were the writers or inventors, and frequently the actors, of the plays, usually written in mixed prose and verse. As mysterious subjects were chosen the lives and marvels of the saints, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Creation, Fall, or Conquests of Hell - these performances acquired the general name of Mysteries. The 'theatre' was a cathedral, a scaffold in the open air, or a movable stage on wheels, drawn from street to street, or from town to town. As the cart stopped at given points, the actors threw open the doors, and proceeded to perform the scenes allotted them. A graduated platform in three divisions, represented Heaven, Earth, and Hell.

were the Deity and His angels, passive when not actually mingling in the action; in the center moved the human world, the actors standing motionless at one side when they had nothing to say or do; and the yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, emitting smoke and flames when required, showed the entrance to the bottomless pit, into which, through the expanded jaws, the damned were dragged with shrieks of agony by demons.

The miracle plays were, in the fifteenth century, transformed into moral plays by exchanging scriptural and historical characters for abstract, allegorical, or symbolical impersonations,— Pride, Gluttony, Temperance, Faith, Riches, Good Deeds, and the like. To relieve their

gravity, under which the audience were liable to yawn and sleep, the Devil was retained, and a more natural buffoon was introduced in the Vice, who acted the part of a broad, rampant jester. These two were the darlings of the multitude. Full of pranks and swaggering fun, a part of Vice's ordinary business was to treat the Devil with ribald familiarity, to crack saucy jokes upon him, to bestride him and beat him till he roared, and in the end to be carried off to Hell on his back.

The next step was the relinquishing of abstract for individual characters, a transition represented by Heywood's Interludes, long before acted in the midst of the morality for the amusement of the people, but now secularized, and made into a kind of farce.

The interlude paved the way for the representation of real life and manners, the first stage of which begins with Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, a comedy, and Sackvill's Gorbodue, a tragedy. It soon passed to a splendid maturity, extending in a single generation over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy. From the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the accession of Anne (1580-1702), and particularly to the great rebellion (15801642), may be reckoned the period of the old English dramatists, among whom Shakespeare stood preeminent. He, with the constellation of kindred spirits about him, raised the romantic or Gothic drama to the highest perfection it has ever achieved. Its subsequent general tendency has been downward. Sheridan's School for Scandal, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Knowles' Virginius, Bulwer's Richelieu and Lady of Lyons, are nearly the sole dramas, since produced, that have possessed literary merit and, at the same time, the qualities requisite for successful presentation. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, have adopted the dramatic form, but only to show how rare a

gift is popular dramatic art - the art of portraying actual life and passion in interesting situations. Most of the successful plays, on the other hand, do not and cannot, rise into the region of literature. They succeed less by vivid language and vigorous thought than by pomp and noise, transferring the stress from the mental to the physical.

Literary compositions run into each other, like colors; easily distinguished in their strong tints, but susceptible of so much variety, and of so many different forms, that we never can say precisely where one species ends and another begins. The shore-marks of poetical division rest, now on style, now on matter, now on purpose, but do not, save in single features, define and subdivide the field. In most poems there is a mixture of all the modes of poetic effect, leaving it doubtful which type is most closely adhered to. Convenient designations for ordinary speech would be epic, like Milton's great poem; dramatic, like Shakespeare's plays; lyric, like the songs in his plays; narrative, like the Lady of the Lake; descriptive, like the Seasons; allegorical, like the Faerie Queene; didactic, like Pope's Essay on Criticism; satirical, intended to vituperate, to lash, or to reform, like the Hudibras.

It remains to indicate some of the uses of poetry. (1) It is the great thesaurus of beauty, embellishment, and illustration. The eminent Brougham has said that the art of happy quotation is second only to that of happy invention. (2) It is an important aid to genuine copiousness and flow of language. So practical a man as Dr. Franklin, having recognized it as an important source of his own excellent English, recommended the study of poetry and the writing of verse for this very purpose. (3) It cultivates a love of high thought, and tends to give to our taste for reading the stability of habit. (4) It gives an æsthetic culture and refinement to the mind, and disposes the heart to virtue. It is the province of poetry