sion killed an enemy in single combat. On the close of the campaign, he relinquished the military profession, and returning to England, resolved to devote himself exclusively to literary pursuits. Feeling greatly the deficiency of his acquirements as a scholar, he entered St. John's College, Cambridge; but his funds were soon exhausted, and, leaving college, he had recourse to the stage, not in the first place as an author, but an actor. The most memorable incident of this period of his career, was a quarrel with one of his brother performers, ending in a duel, in which his antagonist was killed, and he himself severely wounded. He was imprisoned in consequence, and narrowly escaped with his life. A second time we find him in prison, in consequence of his share in a satirical comedy, called "Eastwood Hoe," which gave great offence to the Court. It is now interesting to us chiefly as bringing under our notice the authors who united with Jonson in its production. These were Chapman and Marston, neither of whom can, however, claim a very high rank as dramatists. The latter, indeed, though the abler of the two, figures in no very honourable guise, as the Crispinus of Jonson's satirical poetaster. It is no slight evidence of Jonson's assiduous study, that he was noted by his best critics no less for his learning than his genius. He had the usual amount of self-conceit which is rarely found wanting in self-taught men, and was brought by it into frequent collisions with his contemporaries, who loved to mortify his pride. Along with great warmth of temper, however, he was capable of displaying the most generous friendship, and he displayed altogether such varied talent, and so much wit, fancy, and prolific invention, as amply justifies the laconic, but most expressive inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey:

"O! rare Ben Jonson." He ranks, indeed, next to Shakspeare, but the difference between amply serves to show the pre-eminent grandeur of the latter compared with all others.

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, the twin-dramatists of this remarkable era, both enjoyed all the advantages of good birth and early education. Beaumont's father was a judge of the Common Pleas, and after completing his studies at Cambridge, he entered the Middle Temple, as a student of law. It does not seem probable that he ever made any very great progress in his legal studies. He was only in his twenty-first year when the first play was produced, the joint labour of Fletcher and him, who lived together till the marriage of the former. On the 6th of March 1615, Beaumont died at the early age of thirty. His remains were interred at the entrance of St. Benedict's Chapel, Westminster Abbey, but no inscription points out his tomb to the wanderer through that shrine, so richly strewn with the dust of the mighty dead.

Fletcher survived his brother poet ten years. He was cut off by the plague in 1625, at the age of forty-nine, so that he was considerably the senior of his friend. He claimed, however, no supremacy, but generously put the younger poet's name the first, in all the publications of their joint labours after the death of his associate. They contributed conjointly upwards of fifty tragedies, comedies, and other works, to the poetic literature of the age. Fletcher was the son of the Bishop of London, and received the full advantages of a university education at Cambridge; but we know about as little of him as of the great dramatist with whom it is not his least honour to be permitted to rank as a contemporary and competitor for fame.

The fourth of these contemporaries of Shakspeare is PHILIP MASSINGER, the son of a dependent of the Earl of Pembroke. Through the influence of the latter he was educated at Oxford, but on leaving the university, which he did abruptly, he entered on a life of almost uninterrupted privation and struggle, his patron the earl having died when he was in his sixteenth year, and his father when he was twenty. He was driven by his necessities to the stage for support, and little as we know of him, that little justifies the darkest surmises as to his life of poverty and sorrow. In Dulwich College, Malone discovered by accident a letter subscribed by him, along with two other dramatic poets, craving an advance of five pounds from a manager, to save them from the horrors of a jail. His rapidity of composition was remarkable, and there is good reason for believing that many of his plays have been lost. Of his private life we know nothing, save that it was one of incessant poverty. Yet there is no reason for believing that this arose from any follies or vices of his own, but more probably from an extreme diffidence and modesty, which even led him to write for others, and allow them to reap the entire credit of such productions, rather than trust to his own merits, or seek to establish a reputation for himself. Campbell justly remarks of him: "While his dedications bespeak incessant distress and dependence, the recommendatory poems prefixed to his plays address him with attributes of virtue, which are seldom lavished with flattery or falsehood on those who are poor." His life of painful struggle with adversity suddenly terminated in his fifty-sixth year, when he retired, in apparent health, and was found dead in bed next morning. He was buried in St. Saviour's Church, London. No stone nor inscription marks the spot, but a

record in the parish registry has this melancholy and too graphic entry, "Philip Massinger, a stranger." So closed his sad career. One of his biographers remarks of him: "All the writers of his life unite in representing him as a man of singular candour, modesty, gentleness, and affability, nor does it appear that he ever made or found an enemy." He seems, in so far as we may now surmise, to have been one of those amiable, unpractical, and shy retiring men, who suffer in silence, and are utterly incapable of successfully fighting the battle of life. Others of his literary contemporaries had to struggle and to suffer. But his whole life seems to have been one long sorrowful pang-a winter with no show of warmth, and no single gleam of sunshine. And as his age, amid its abundant intellectual wealth, left him thus to die a neglected stranger, so posterity seemed equally careless of him. For upwards of seventy years his name was scarcely heard of; and yet, in our own day, Hallam has not hesitated to pronounce him the equal of Jonson in the higher comedy.

Shakspeare's dramatic writings, though so noble in the prevailing tone of their moral strength and virtue, are not free from some of the impurities of thought which appear to have been tolerated in his age in a way we have happily little conception of now. But those who may have been pained by such blemishes in the writings of England's greatest poet, will return to them with a sense of their purity, according to the standard of his day, after a perusal of those now mentioned as his contemporaries. Next to him, Massinger is the best; but all of them are frequently gross and indelicate; and the plots of Beaumont and Fletcher especially frequently indicate a purposed coarseness, which greatly detracts from their other merits. This indelicacy of thought and grossness

of language is a blot on these earlier dramatists of England, which has not been without its influence on their successors; yet, from amid works marred by such blemishes, much beautiful and lofty poetry may be extracted, proving their just claims to be named along with him who stands forth so pre-eminently the poet of all times.

In succession to these masculine writers by whom the modern English drama was established in the form which it continues to assume in our own day, we shall now briefly notice the class of poets who, though reckoned under the general head of Elizabethan Poets, would, under a stricter and more minute subdivision, be classified under the head of the "Stuart Poets." Their appearance dates, for the most part, in the reign of James I., and the majority of them figure more or less prominently in the reign of his unfortunate son, Charles I. They include writers of sweet, graceful, and lively fancy, but generally of inferior power or compass of thought to those already noted as the founders of our national drama. As one of the sweetest and most graceful of this class of writers, may be mentioned DRUMMOND of Hawthornden, the son of Sir John Drummond, a descendant of one of the most illustrious Scottish families. He was through life a devoted adherent to Charles I., and his death, which took place ten months after the execution of the king, is believed to have been the result of his deep grief at his royal master's death.

William Drummond was educated at the High School and University of Edinburgh, to which he subsequently added the advantages of travel, and studied civil law for a time at Bourges in France. From this he returned to Scotland in 1610, and entered on the possession of the