Petit André of recorders. Nothing annoys him so much as a reprieve; and in truth the mode in which reprieves were obtained was not such as exactly to please a conscientious recorder who should bring to his vocation only half the gusto of Fleetwood. He writes to Burghley, "It is grown for a trade now in the court to make means for reprieves; twenty pound for a reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days." The court, however, had a politic regard to the personal safety of some of its members in thus holding the halter in check. The Recorder has a very characteristic passage upon this matter:-" Mr. Nowell, of the court, hath lately been here in London: he caused his man to give a blow unto a carman; his man hath stricken the carman with the pummel of his sword, and therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man are like to be indicted; whereof I am sure to be much troubled, what with letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like case heretofore I have been even with the same man." But there was money to be made in court in more ways than one. Twenty pound for a reprieve" was really nothing compared with the large prices which the greater courtiers obtained by begging lands. In the old play called Jack Drum's Entertainment' one of the characters says, "I have followed ordinaries this twelvemonths, only to find a fool that had lands, or a fellow that would talk treason, that I might beg him." Garrard, in his letters to Lord Strafford, communicates a bit of news to his patron, which not only illustrates the unprincipled avarice of the courtiers-down almost to the time when a national convulsion swept this and other abominations away with much that was good and graceful-but which story is full of a deep tragic interest. An old usurer dies in Westminster; his will is opened, and all the property-the coin, the plate, the jewels, and the bonds-all is left to his man-servant. The unhappy creature goes mad amidst his riches; and there is but one thing thought of at court for a week—who is to be successful in begging him. Elizabeth had the merit of abolishing the more hateful practice of begging concealed lands, that is such lands as at the dissolution of the monasteries had privily got into the possession of private persons. There was not a title in the kingdom that was thus safe from the rapacity of the begging courtiers. But, having lost this prey, they displayed a new ability for the discovery of treason and treasonable talk. In the Poetaster,' written in 1601, Jonson does not hesitate to speak out boldly against this abominable practice. The characters in the following dialogue are Lupus, Cæsar, Tucca, and Horace; and, as we have already mentioned, Jonson himself was designated under the name of Horace :

A libel, Cæsar; a dangerous, seditious libel; a libel in picture.

"Lup.
Cæsar. A libel!

Lup. Ay; I found it in this Horace his study, in Mecenas his house here; I challenge the penalty of the laws against them.

Tuc. Ay, and remember to beg their land betimes; before some of these hungry courthounds scent it out.

Cæsar. Show it to Horace: ask him if he know it.

Lup. Know it! his hand is at it, Cæsar.

Cæsar. Then 't is no libel.

Hor. It is the imperfect body of an emblem, Cæsar, I began for Mecænas.

Lup. An emblem! right: that 's Greek for a libel. Do but mark how confident he is.

Hor. A just man cannot fear, thou foolish tribune ;

Not, though the malice of traducing tongues,

The open vastness of a tyrant's ear,

The senseless rigour of the wrested laws,
Or the red eyes of strain'd authority,

Should, in a point, meet all to take his life:

His innocence is armour 'gainst all these."

Soon after the accession of James, Jonson himself went to prison for a supposed libel against the Scots, in Eastward Ho;' in the composition of which comedy he assisted Chapman and Marston. They were soon pardoned: but it was previously reported that their ears and noses were to be slit. Jonson's mother, at an entertainment which he made on his liberation, "drank to him, and showed him a paper which she designed, if the sentence had taken effect, to have mixed with his drink, and it was strong and hasty poison." Jonson, who tells this story himself, says, "to show that she was no churl, she designed to have first drank of it herself." This is a terrible illustration of the ways of despotism. Jonson was pardoned, probably through some favouritism. Had it been otherwise, the future laureat of James would have died by poison in a wretched prison, and that poison given by his mother. Did the bricklayer's wife learn this terrible stoicism from her classical son? Fortunately there was in the world at that day, as there is now, a higher spirit to make calamity endurable than that of mere philosophy; and Jonson learnt this in sickness and old age. After ho had become a favourite at court he still lost no proper occasion of lashing the rapacious courtiers. If a riot took place in a house, and manslaughter was committed, the house became a deodand to the Crown, and was begged as usual. In The Silent Woman,' first acted in 1609, one of the characters says, "O, sir, here hath like to have been murder since you went; a couple of knights fallen out about the bride's favours: we were fain to take away their weapons; your house had been begged by this time else." To the question, "For what?" comes the sarcastic answer, "For manslaughter, sir, as being accessary."

The universal example of his age made Jonson what we should now call a court flatterer. Elizabeth-old, wrinkled, capricious, revengeful-was "the divine Cynthia." But Jonson compounded with his conscience for flattering the Queen, by satirizing her court with sufficient earnestness; and this, we dare say, was not in the least disagreeable to the Queen herself. In Cynthia's Revels' we have a very bizarre exhibition of the fantastic gallantry, the absurd coxcombities, the pretences to wit, which belonged to lords in waiting and maids of honour. Affectation here wears her insolent as well as her "sickly mien." Euphuism was not yet extinct; and so the gallant calls his mistress "my Honour," and she calls him "her Ambition." But this is small work for a satirist of Jonson's turn; and he boldly denounces "pride and ignorance" as "the two essential parts of the courtier." "The ladies and gallants lie languishing upon the rushes;" and this is a picture of the scenes in the antechambers:

"There stands a neophyte glazing of his face,
Preening his clothes, perfuming of his hair,
Against his idol enters; and repeats,
Like an imperfect prologue, at third music,
His parts of speeches, and confederate jests,
In passion to himself. Another swears
His scene of courtship over; bids, believe him,
Twenty times ere they will; anon, doth seem

The dramatist has bolder delineations of profligacy and ambition-portraits in which the family likeness of two centuries and a half ago may yet be traced, if we make due allowances for the differences between the antique ruff and the costume of our unpicturesque days :—

"Here stalks me by a proud and spangled sir,

That looks three handfuls higher than his foretop;
Savours himself alone, is only kind

And loving to himself; one that will speak
More dark and doubtful than six oracles;
Salutes a friend as if he had a stitch;
Is his own chronicle, and scarce can eat
For registering himself; is waited on
By ninnies, jesters, panders, parasites,
And other such-like prodigies of men.
He pass'd, appears some mincing marmoset
Made all of clothes and face; his limbs so set
As if they had some voluntary act
Without man's motion, and must move just so
In spite of their creation: one that weighs
His breath between his teeth, and dares not smile
Beyond a point, for fear t' unstarch his look;
Hath travell'd to make legs, and seen the cringe
Of several courts and courtiers; knows the time
Of giving titles, and of taking walls;

Hath read court commonplaces; made them his
Studied the grammar of state, and all the rules
Each formal usher in that politic school
Can teach a man. A third comes, giving nods
To his repenting creditors, protests

To weeping suitors, takes the coming gold
Of insolent and base ambition,

That hourly rubs his dry and itchy palms;
Which grip'd, like burning coals, he hurls away
Into the laps of bawds and buffoons' mouths.
With him there meets some subtle Proteus, one
Can change and vary with all forms he sees;

Be anything but honest; serves the time;
Hovers betwixt two factions, and explores

The drifts of both, which, with cross face, he bears

To the divided heads, and is receiv'd

With mutual grace of either.”

There was, however, in that age, amidst these follies and vices, something much higher, even within the precincts of the court itself. Its luxuries and affectations had in truth something gorgeous and refined in their conception. The very pretences to wit and poetry grew out of a reverence for intellectual

things. If there was much mere gallantry, there was some earnest and real affection. In the courts of Elizabeth and James the love of high literature was in some degree the salt which preserved the heart and the understanding untainted. The ladies, for the most part, were thoroughly accomplished, in the best sense of the word. Sydney's sister, according to Jonson's epitaph, was

The epithet "learn'd" does not here imply anything extraordinary. Sydney's dedication of his Arcadia' to this beloved sister is an address to one whose taste and judgment are absolute :-" You desired me to do it, and your desire, to my heart, is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done." Many an immortal poem has thus been read "in loose sheets of paper," with a tearful eye and a swelling heart, by some young votaress who has felt that there is something better in the world than the splendours with which riches and power have surrounded her.

It was in the spirit of a high literature that the Masques of the courts of Elizabeth and James were conceived. The dramatic entertainments-Shakspere's especially

those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James,"

were open to all the world; and the great showed their good sense in cherishing those wonderful productions, which could not have been what they are if they had been conceived in a spirit of exclusiveness. But the Masque was essentially courtly and regal. It was produced at great expense. It was, like the Italian Opera, conceived in that artistical spirit which makes its own laws and boundaries. It did not profess to be an imitation of common life. To be understood, it assumed that a certain portion of classical knowledge and taste existed in the spectator. Hurd, in his 'Dialogues,' says, "I should desire to know what courtly amusements even of our time are comparable to the shows and masques which were the delight and improvement of the court of Elizabeth." The masques of the time of Elizabeth were, however, not in the slightest degree comparable with those produced in the reign of James; in which such men as Jonson, and Daniel, and Fletcher, were the artificers-" artificer" is the expression which Jonson applies to himself in connexion with these performances. The masques of Elizabeth were little more than the old pageants, in which heathen deities walked in procession amidst loud music; and the cloth of gold and the silver tinsel constituted a far higher attraction than the occasional speeches of the performers.

Bacon, whose own mind was essentially poetical, has an essay Of Masques and Triumphs. His notions are full of taste:-"It is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost. Dancing to song is a thing of great state and pleasure." Choirs placed one over against another,-scenes abounding with light, colours of white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green, graceful suits, not after examples of known attires,-sweet odours suddenly coming forth;-these are Bacon's notions of the chief requisites of a masque. His ideas were realized in the masques of Jonson.

A volume, not only interesting to the antiquary, but full of romantic and