memory after the books have lost their transitory effects. These are the ones that possess a special degree of convincingness, seeming to proclaim their birth in the author's inmost consciousness and understanding; and he creates this peculiar magnetic personality almost unintentionally and unconsciously. These ways just mentioned are among the chief by which Thackeray gets his remarkable like-like effects in characterdrawing. This paper is but sketchy and incomplete; yet if all should be stated that analysis could reach, there would still remain a stretch of power untouched. Every novelist has the same choice in diction, motive, circumstance, belonging to general human nature; but not every one has the innate power and happy chance in manipulation and appeal. There is a wealth of experience in the novelist—and in the reader-behind all Thackeray's successful figures; and analysis can never entirely solve the problem of how the illusion of reality is created or state how synthesis is made by the glow of imagination and feeling.

KATHARINE MERRILL.

XI. TOM TYLER AND HIS WIFE.

The comedy which appears in the following pages is reprinted from "the second impression," as it is called on the title page, made by Francis Kirkman in the year 1661: the first edition is apparently no longer extant. Francis Kirkman occupies an interesting position in the history of the English drama as the first man to interest himself in the collection and preservation of old English plays. To him we owe the reprint of Lust's Dominion, which has been attribited to Marlowe, of The Thracian Wonder, of Gammer Gurton's Nedle, and of other plays; and from Kirkman we have the first attempt at a catalogue of English dramas, the foundation on which Langbaine, Baker, Reed, and others were later to build. The earlier form of Kirkman's "an exact Catalogue of all the playes that were ever yet printed" appeared as a supplement to the present play, and included six hundred and ninety items. A few years later Kirkman had increased his list to eight hundred and six. He tells us that he had seen and read all these plays and that he possesses most of them, which he is willing to sell or lend upon reasonable consideration.'

1 See the article on Kirkman in the Dictionary of National Biography and a passage from his, "The Unlucky Citizen," reprinted by Collier, History of Dramatic Poetry, 2, 354.

1

Tom Tyler and his Wife was not unknown to our older antiquaries, although several mistakes appear to have arisen about it. Langbaine contains no mention of it. In Ames's Typographical Antiquities we find a description of "A ballet declaringe the fal of the whore of Babylone intytuled Tye thy mare Tom-boye, with other and thereunto annexed a prologe to the reders, Apocalyps 18," which ends "quod Wyllyam Kith." Ames assigns this "ballet" to the year 1547. One of the songs of Tom Tyler is written on this refrain of "Tie the mare, Tomboy." But the psalmist, Wyllyam Kith, or Keth, as he is more usually called, is not the author of this play: and this, despite the alleged parallel by which a not dissimilar production, Gammer Gurton's Nedle, has been commonly assigned to Bishop Still. Indeed, the two songs of which Kith's is reprinted by Ritson have nothing in common except their measure and the refrain. In 1764 Baker mentioned this play as "Tome Tylere and his Wyfe. A passing merrie Interlude. Anon. 4to. 1598. This play has been attributed, but, we believe, without foundation, to William Wayer." This statement is repeated in the second and third editions of the Biographia Dramatica, and in Halliwell's spoiling of this good old book, A Dictionary of Old English Plays, 1860. In A Manuel for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays, by W. C. Hazlitt, 1892, the title of Kirkman's edition is quoted, but no date is ventured for the first appearance. Hazlitt adds, "no copy of any earlier edition is known nor does it appear to have been licensed."

The first edition of Ritson's Ancient Songs reprints the "ballet" of Kith, alluded to above, and in commenting upon it says this song is "particularly alluded to in 'the passing merrie Interlude' of Tom Tylere and his Wyfe, first printed

in 1578." From the evident quotation of a title which differs in wording and spelling from "the second impression," that of 1661, and from the fact that Baker and Ritson agree as to that title save for a single letter (Ritson's "Tom" for "Tome"), it is plain that one or both of these authorities had seen an earlier edition of this play. But as the subsequent editions of both Baker and Ritson adhere to their dates first set down, and as Kirkman suggests even an earlier one for the editio princeps of Tom Tyler in the words of his title, "Printed and Acted about a hundred years ago," we must acknowledge the date of the earliest publication of this play inascertainable on external evidence. Ritson's date, 1578, is certainly the more probable, and Collier follows him, paying a passing and becoming tribute to Ritson's correctness. I do not find the source of Baker's assignment of this play to William Wager. Wager is the author of one extant interlude, The longer thou livest the more fool thou, in which, according to Collier, the moral of the necessity of giving children a good and pious education is duly enforced. It is not impossible that Wager wrote Tom Tyler, the probable date and the general character of the two interludes are not repugnant. But as Wager's known interlude is not accessible to me I can offer no opinion on this subject.

2

From the prologue of Tom Tyler we learn that it was "set out by pretty boys." Several companies of boy actors, as is well known, were active, especially in the sixties and seventies. The play concludes with a prayer for the queen in which a "perilous chance that hath been seen" is mentioned. The publication of the concluding prayer is always an evidence of an early Elizabethan play. The "perilous chance" may refer to the discovery of the Ridolfi conspiracy in 1571. But prologue and epilogue are extraneous parts of a play

1P. 130. It is to be noted that Collier, Dyce, Beaumont and Fletcher, American ed., 1854, 2, 194, and Ward, History, ed. 1899, 1, 142, all accept this date.

History of Dramatic Poetry, 1831, 2, 353.
Ibid., p. 332.

and as such are subject to continual change and revision, for which reason too much weight is not to be attached to them.

In considering the internal evidence of probable date, derivable from the vocabulary, general style and metre of this play, I felt interested to ask expert opinion. I therefore entrusted it to my friend, Dr. C. P. G. Scott of Philadelphia, who generously returned me so full and satisfactory an answer that it seems but justice to him that I quote his own words :—

"The vocabulary of the play at once places it, on a superficial view, in the period between 1530 and 1580. A consideration of a few expressions like coaks (p. 283), cock on hoop (p. 280), crossbite (p. 274), hoddie doddee (p. 280), javel (p. 270), Laron (p. 265) (for which read Lacon, a too classical spelling of Lakin-by Lacon being for by'r Lakin) indicates a time more definitely between 1540 and 1570.

"The general style of the wit, the appearance of 'Strife' as the name of a character, the rude good nature of the brawling and basting, the brutality of speech and action to the shrewish wife, the senseless composition of the quarrel, point to the same period.

"In the doggerel style, the inner rime, the deadly iteration of jingle, the occasional forced rimes, and other details, the play accords with similar features more or less present in other pieces of the middle third of the sixteenth century, e. g., Heywood's Four P's (1533), Proverbs and Epigrams (1562), Bale's Kyng Johan (c. 1550), and similar productions.

"The adopted meter and rime-scheme involve the use of forced rimes, and of some words or forms not normal to the time when the work was written. The effect is an occasional archaism, which seems at times to place the piece a generation earlier.

"The constructions, so far as they are not normal, are archaic or forced, and concur in suggesting the period 15401570 as the period of writing. But there are indications of some smoothing in the text as printed in the year 1661.

"The orthography is not at all like that of any part of the sixteenth century. It is in the main that of the period of print