the end he magnanimously surrenders Campaspe to Apelles. He frankly confesses that 'Alexander cannot subdue the affections of men, though he conquer their countries,' and declares 'it were a shame he should desire to command the world, if he could not command himself.' Apelles' sudden passion for his beautiful 'sitter' is well pourtrayed, and there is a charming scene in the painter's studio. When will you finish Campaspe?' asks the amorous monarch. 'Never finish,' is the reply, 'for always in absolute beauty there is somewhat above art.' Alexander borrows Apelles' pencil, but finds that he bungles sadly in his attempts. How have I done here?' he inquires. 'Like a king,' is the diplomatic answer, to which Alexander makes rejoinder, 'I think so: but nothing more unlike a painter.' Apelles has musical as well as artistic gifts, and from his lips. floats one of the daintiest of Elizabethan songs, 'Cupid and my Campaspe.' A minor plot is provided by a group of philosophers and their servants. In bold defiance of dates, Plato, Aristotle, Crisippus, Crates, Cleanthes, and Anaxarchus are all included in Alexander's retinue, but they are shadowy figures. Diogenes, on the other hand, the tub-philosopher, is admirably drawn. His biting repartees show Lyly's dialectical power at its best, and he would more than hold his own in wordy warfare with Shakspere's Apemantus. On the principle of 'like master, like man,' he is suited with a servant Manes, who can give as good as he gets, and who as often as not bears off the honours in a duel of abuse.

Two of the allegorical plays, Sapho and Phao and Endimion, treat of Elizabeth's relations with Leicester. In both cases Lyly twists the original story to make it serve his special purpose. Phao, the ferryman of Syracuse, is endowed by Venus with marvellous beauty, and thus wins the heart of Sapho, the princess of the city. For long it had been said of her that 'she conquers affections and sendeth love up and down upon errands,' but Cupid at his mother's bidding transfixes her with an arrow. The result is her passion for the handsome ferryman, which he returns, though aware that it is 'unmeet for his birth, his fortune, his years.' The struggle in Sapho's breast between love and dignity is well portrayed, and there is true charm in the

scene where the princess, sick with concealed affection, sends for Phao as a physician, and they hint at their feelings in phrases of double meaning. Lyly uses an ingenious artifice to cut the knot. Venus herself becomes enamoured of the youth whom she has made so fair, and she bids Cupid strike Sapho with a fresh arrow which will cause her to disdain Phao. This he does, but at the same time he strikes the ferryman with an arrow which inspires him with loathing of Venus. Thus the goddess is crossed in her purposes, and Cupid even adopts Sapho as his mother, and promotes her to the place of Queen of Love. Phao, when he finds that Sapho has become indifferent to him, bids farewell to Syracuse, though he declares his resolution, 'wherever I wander to be as I were ever kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.'

In the Epilogue to the play Lyly hints at its underlying meaning, to which he dares not venture to furnish a key. The same subject is more elaborately handled in Endimion. Here Lyly, reversing the classical story, represents Endimion as enamoured of Cynthia, the moon-goddess. For her sake he slights his earthly mistress, Tellus, who in revenge persuades the witch Dipsas to charm him into a deep sleep. Tellus suffers for her treachery by being condemned to imprisonment in a lonely castle under the charge of Corsites. Endimion slumbers for forty years, till his friend Eumenides learns by supernatural means that Cynthia's kiss will waken him. The goddess visits the sleeper and finds him grown from youth to age, but a touch from her lips breaks the spell and rouses him from his trance. Tellus, who has inspired her gaoler Corsites with a violent passion, then confesses that she plotted against Endimion because she was jealous of his love for Cynthia. But Endimion protests against his feeling for one so exalted being given such

a name.

'The time was, madam, and is, and ever shall be, that I honoured your highness above all the world, but to stretch it so far to call it love I never durst. There hath none pleased mine eye but Cynthia, none delighted mine ears but Cynthia, none possessed my heart but Cynthia. Such a difference hath the gods set between our states that all must be duty, loyalty, and reverence, nothing (without it vouchsafe your highness) be termed love.'

These words are exactly applicable to the relations of Leicester and Elizabeth, which almost certainly form the groundwork of the play, though Halpin's interpretation of details may be open. to doubt. He identifies Tellus with the Countess of Sheffield, whom Leicester clandestinely married while he was paying suit to Elizabeth. Endimion's sleep is his imprisonment at Greenwich; the friendly intervention of Eumenides is that of the Earl of Sussex; and the solution of the difficulty in Tellus' marriage to Corsites is the union of Lady Sheffield with Sir Edward Stafford. Besides these incidents in Elizabethan court life, the play has a humorous underplot, of which the central figure is Sir Tophas. He is an admirable specimen of the Miles Gloriosus, a type which had already been introduced from the classical stage in Roister Doister; and in his mixture of bragging and pedantry he specially anticipates Don Armado. He at first loudly protests his scorn of love, but soon becomes infatuated with the witch Dipsas, and at the end, when she is found to be married, he is paired off with her maid Bagoa. This degrading union completes his contrast with Endimion, who remains unwedded because he has fixed his affections on a being above the sphere of earth.

Midas lifts us out of the atmosphere of courtly love-complications into the region of international politics. It is the most powerful of Lyly's comedies, and though extremely simple in construction, it merits high praise as a piece of imaginative satire. The story of Midas, King of Phrygia, who obtained the fatal gift of turning all that he touched into gold, is here applied to Philip of Spain. We see Midas debating with his advisers what to choose from Bacchus, and finally deciding in favour of gold. But he soon bitterly rues the effects of his greed, and he bursts into fierce self-reproaches in a speech which is in reality a crushing indictment of the Spanish foreign policy, especially of the expedition against England.

'I have written my laws in blood, and made my gods of gold. Have I not made the sea to groan under the number of my ships: and have they not perished, that there was not two left to make a number? Have I not thrust my subjects into a camp, like oxen into a cart; whom having_made slaves by unjust wars, I use now as slaves for all wars? . . . Why did I wish that all might be gold I touched but that I thought all men's hearts would

be touched with gold; that what policy could not compass or prowess, gold might have commanded and conquered? A bridge of gold did I mean to make in that island where all my navy could not make a breach. Those islands did I long to touch that I might turn them to gold and myself to glory. But unhappy Midas, who by the same means perisheth himself that he thought to conquer others: being now become a slave to the world, a scorn to that petty prince, and to thyself a consumption. A petty prince, Midas? No, a prince protected by the gods, by nature, by his own virtue, and his subjects' obedience.'

The same theme of Philip's shortsighted ambition in seeking to conquer Lesbos, as England is named, recurs throughout the second half of the play, where Midas, freed from his disastrous gift, is endowed with asses' ears for preferring Pan's music to that of Apollo. The man who lets his perceptions of the fitness of things be blunted by his desires is turned into a laughingstock, as Philip had found in the case of the Armada. There is only one way by which he can get rid of his deformity, he renounces for the future all aggressive aims: 'I perceive (and yet not too late) that Lesbos will not be touched by gold, by force it cannot: that the gods have pitched it out of the world, as not to be controlled by any in the world.' It speaks well for Lyly's sagacity that he should have so clearly foreseen that Spain would be ruined by her gold-fever and lust of dominion; and Midas is an interesting specimen of the political type of drama which was developed later by Middleton and Massinger.

One play of Lyly, Mother Bombie, stands apart from the rest. It is not an adaptation of a classical story, but a comedy in the characteristic Italian manner, though the scene is supposed to be laid at Rochester, in Lyly's native county. The plot hinges upon an elaborate series of mistakes in identity, and of the complications in wooing which thence arise. The unnaturally symmetrical balance of the characters gives an air of artificiality to the whole, but the construction is ingenious, and Mother Bombie is remarkable as the first original English comedy, in the strict sense, written in prose.

Thus both as novelist and playwright Lyly may justly claim to be an innovator, and Shakspere is among those who came under his widespread influence. Doubtless the Stratford dramatist, with his aversion to all affectations of speech, was keenly alive to the absurdities of Euphuism, which he

parodies in the speech of Falstaff to Prince Hal (1 Henry IV,

ii. 4).

'Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears. . . . There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile: so doth the company thou keepest; for, Harry, now do I not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also.'

Further evidence is supplied by As You Like It and The Winter's Tale. These plays are founded on novels written in Euphuistic style, but Shakspere, as will be more fully shown, substituted a simpler diction, and replaced Lyly's 'unnatural natural' philosophy by genuine Warwickshire countrylore. Yet the great dramatist shows traces of his predecessor's influence in the remarkable frequency of the allusions to animals-sometimes of a fabulous nature-which occur in the early plays and poems, as well as in later works like Lear and Coriolanus. Moreover, though Shakspere mocked at the artifices of Euphuism, he must have appreciated its incisive force, its lucidity and refinement. These are the qualities which specially distinguish his own colloquial prose, and when we listen to the brilliant sallies of Falstaff or Benedick, Beatrice or Rosalind, we should remember that they have their prelude in the witty dialogue of Campaspe or Endimion. Lyly too set the fashion which Shakspere followed of introducing lyrics, as a musical relief; and his imaginative type of comedy, with its supernatural framework and allegorical design, pointed the way to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

and

GEORGE PEELE was born in Devonshire about 1552, like Lyly, after studying at Oxford, came up to London, where he wrote plays and poems, and made vain efforts to secure court patronage. His services to dramatic literature were slighter than his conventional reputation would lead us to expect. first work of importance was The Arraignment of Paris, performed in 1584 before the Queen by the children of the Chapel Royal. It is written in verse, but otherwise it bears a strong

His