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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.

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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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the year 1600, and it was here that Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair was first acted in 1614. The building was demoli-hed in 1656 and houses were built upon its site. About a year previously seven of the bears belonging to the Bear Garden had been shot by order of Pride, then Sheriff of Surrey, by a company of soldiers. Paris Garden itself became a theatre in 1613. In Dekker's Untrussing of the Humorous Poet we find it thus alluded to :

"Tucca. Thou hast been in Paris Garden, hast not?

Horace. Yes, captain, I ha' played Zulziman there."

The most famous of all the Bankside theatres was the Globe, built on the site occupied by Barclay's Brewery in Park Street. A view with a detailed notice of the Globe Theatre will be found in the volume of The Best Plays of Webster and Tourneur.

Many persons connected with the theatres lived on the Bankside -Beaumont and Fletcher, Henslowe, Alleyn, Kempe, Lowin. The Falcon Inn was the favourite resort of dramatists and players; and St. Saviour's, close by, is the burial-place of Gower, Fletcher, Massinger, Sir Edward Dyer, the poet, Shakespeare's younger brother, Edmund, and Henslowe, the manager.

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