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the drowning heart below, and all is silence. He is rich in those words and lines of sweet and subtle music

"Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;
For he is like to something I remember,

A great while since, a long, long time ago."

When we think of Ford we think of Giovanni and Annabella, passionate children who had given the world for love; of the childish sophistry with which they justified themselves, and of their last marvellous dialogue through which pierced a vague sense of guilt—a lurid shadow cast from the world they had contemned. We think of that Bianca (she that "owned the poor style of Duchess") who had thrown such scorn on her lover that he vowed never to speak to her again of unlawful love, and who comes to him in his sleep the night after, unclad and alone, in the last abandonment of passion. We think of Flavia in The Fancies Chaste and Noble, coldly dismissing her first husband with the one sign of tenderness as she turns at length to her new husband::

"Beshrew 't, the brim of your hat Struck in mine eye."

We think of Calantha, still gracious and calm in the festive dance, as the leaden messages of awful death are shot at slow intervals in her ear, -her father, her friend, her lover, still gracious and calm until her duties are ended.

"When one news straight came huddling on another,

Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.

*

They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings;
Let me die smiling."

Ford is the most modern of the tribe to whom he belonged. When Shelley in his last days began a new drama, of which only fragments remain, he reproduced with added sweetness the tones and cadences of Ford's verse; and the writers to-day who seek, and in vain, to revive our ancient drama on its old lines, instinctively ally themselves with Ford. When we enumerate his great qualities we are enumerating the qualities which make him an ineffectual dramatist. Notwithstanding the ungrudging admiration of his relatives, legal friends, and fellow dramatists, and the "generally well received " report of the outside public, he could at no time have been a really popular playwright; and with the exception of Perkin Warbeck his plays have probably never been represented in more recent times. He was a sensitive observer who had meditated deeply on the springs of human action, especially in women. Of none of his fellows, even the greatest of them, can we say this. They have left us pictures of women which are incomparably more tender, or picturesque, or tragic than the searching, deliberate art of Ford could compass. But they looked nearly all from the outside, and were satisfied

with the gracious or gorgeous stage-pictures which they knew so well how to present. This man writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but as one who had searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy the fibres of their hearts. He was an analyst; he strained the limits of his art to the utmost; he foreboded new ways of expression. Thus he

is less nearly related to the men who wrote Othello, and A Woman killed with Kindness, and Valentinian, than to those poets and artists. of the naked human soul, the writer of Le Rouge et le Noir, and the yet greater writer of Madame Bovary.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

Ford.

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HE Bankside in Southwark was from an early date, even before the days of Henry VIII., one of the favourite resorts of Londoners. It was a semi-rural spot, very easy of access, either by walking over Old London Bridge or by means of the river, at that time a delightful and much frequented highway. Swans floated beneath London Bridge; magnificent barges were frequently to be seen; and in the reign of James I. (according to Taylor, "the Water Poet") "the number of watermen, and those that live and are maintained by them, and by the only labour of the oar and scull, betwixt the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, cannot be fewer than forty thousand; the cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the players playing on the Bankside."

Various amusements-sports, shows, fencings-took place on the Bankside long before any theatres arose there. Chief among these amusements were bull-baitings and bear-baitings at Paris Garden, and when the theatres began to grow up here-as at a later day they grew up along the opposite Strand- the baitings and plays were to some extent combined, the stage being movable. The Rose, close to the Bear and Paris Garden, was the first theatre built on the Bankside. Its origin and exact date are not known; it may have existed even before 1584, when it was called the Little Rose. The Swan Theatre was at the western end of the Bankside. Both the Rose and the Swan Theatres were named after existing tenements mentioned in Edward the Sixth's charter, granting the manor of Southwark to the City of London. The Hope Theatre, which was both a bear-garden and a theatre, was erected prior to

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