In all of them Shakespeare knew the evil that was in the world, strong, vital, terrible, but never wholly destructive of good. There is faith and belief in goodness left. Of the "Big Four," "Hamlet" is the most subtly developed, "Othello" the most perfect in structure and form, "Lear" the grandest and most elemental, and "Macbeth" the most vehement. But I am dealing with superlatives and must fear, for each has some merit not possessed by the others.

These were the culminating years of a busy life in London. After this, for the last period of his life, the dramatist retired to his native town Stratford, buying himself a comfortable home, and living there. Successful men are fond of retiring in age to the places of their birth. It was so with Shakespeare, and thus he is buried in a prominent position beneath the chancel of the church where he was baptized.

His few latest plays all bear the note of this removal from the world of strife. The whole mental attitude has again become changed. The plays are no longer tragical. The heroines are beautiful attractive figures - Imogen, Katharine, Mariana, Perdita, Miranda. They suffer, but all ends happily, as a tale told to a child by an elder near a winter fireside. The men are not great and heroic enough, not sufficiently endowed with elemental strength and passion, for tragedy. In "A Winter's Tale," Leontes is unjust to his wife and lives twenty years mourning: Othello upon discovering his mistake stabbed himself forthwith. In "Cymbeline," Posthumus listens to Iachimo- a little Iago, his name almost seems to imply and later the villain is brought to repentance: Iago could never have repented and Othello would never have lowered himself to enter into a conspiracy against his wife, although he could slay her.

A very ingenious theory has been advanced by Professor Thorndike of Columbia University: that Shakespeare, even to the last, as often before, is merely following a new fashion in these latest plays. Here Beaumont and Fletcher are his models, and "The Maid's Tragedy" is the prototype of this lyrical operatic form of dramatic romance. If this be so, Shakespeare again shows his genius by surpassing his competitors in the new type.

While it is uncertain as to which is Shakespeare's last play, I always think of "The Tempest" as being the dramatist's farewell to his art. The supernatural and fairy-lore are present as in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" and in Mercutio's speech. In the early play the poet had paid the well-known tribute to the poet's art; here he takes formal leave of his dramatist's occupation. As in all the plays of his later life, evil is not absent, nor is its meaning and destructiveness, so prominent in the tragedies, wholly cast aside. But the change in this last group of plays is this: the evil does not seem so black and has not so great sway. The poet-dramatist exercises control and patience in its presence and will not annoy innocence with this knowledge. Caliban is the symbol of evil: it exists even in the happy isle, and though bound and restrained, it is ever ready to break loose again. To the last, the poet, now grown grave and thoughtful and self-contained, thinks of this evil and all the problems which it has entailed. But his labours are now over, and the poet-magician, like Prospero, breaks his wand and gives over his art:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd.

Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled
a turn or two I'll walk

To still my beating mind.

Can it be, as Mr. Bradley happily suggests, that it is the old memories rushing back? The old memories! to the author of these plays and to us the students of them. It may be a fancy, and one fears to push it too far, but it haunts one.

I would close, as I began, with a special plea for the great things in literature, meaning in all literatures. I have heard good men call Dante foolishness, Milton uninteresting, the Iliad

and the Odyssey a superstition and a fetich—and they forthwith turn to the latest periodical and current popular work of fiction. There is no law about these things with individuals. Also at a late meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, two eminent speakers, in welcoming the members of the Association, emphasized on successive occasions that any general study of the ancient classics was doomed and that it rested with the teachers of the Modern Languages to determine the literary training and inspiration which men of the future would possess. Perhaps it must be so. But what I could not at the time help wondering was this: What sort of literary training and literary insight will be obtained and imparted by those who should not know the best wherever it may be found, who would willingly restrict themselves to one literature or even to several literatures of but one age? Knowing the best must include acquaintance with Homer, Æschylus and Sophocles, as well as with Dante and Cervantes and Molière and Goethe, with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. I need make no plea for the ancients and for the classics generally, but it may be safely affirmed that a literary study of the moderns, early and late, not based upon some knowledge of ancient classical literature would very soon tend to become eccentric and volatile.

Nothing has ever taken, or will take, the place of the great things of all times, particularly of great poetry. As long as we must have the best, the study of no real classic in any literature is doomed to extinction or can possibly be wholly neglected. If I may quote from myself elsewhere: "The Tragedy of Orestes, the curse of Edipus, the horror of Hamlet's doubt, the awfulness of Othello's and Lear's mistakes, the problems of Faust's self-struggles, are immortal, because we cannot think of an age when these questions and their expression in artistic form will not appeal to mankind. They must live. It is left to no haphazard vote-taking and change of public opinion. It is the ever longing, suffering, aspiring soul of man that proclaims it." JOHN BELL HENNEMAN.

The University of the South.

THE PASTORAL DRAMA IN THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

The audience for whom the pastoral plays of the eighteenth century were written was not the audience for whom Tasso's "Aminta," Guarini's "Pastor Fido," or, for that matter, Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess," were written. The majority of the plays seem to have been composed largely for the delight of orange-wenches rather than for the delight of a beauty-loving and cultivated society. The spawn of minor dramatists, their authors were not Tassos, Guarinis, or Fletchers, but men whose names are now forgotten.

Following in the steps of greater dramas, but without their poetic qualities, these plays were produced primarily to please. Their preferment of operatic form shows how much they were subject to that arbiter populi, Fad; at least one-third of the entire number of dramatic pastorals which appeared after the beginning of the eighteenth century were operas. Quite different from the quality of this popularity was another cause for the favor they found either as serious or as burlesque literature. The pastoral, circumscribed by certain rules and regulations, appealed to the period's love of regularity. The hue and cry of the Restoration was imitation of nature, an assumed simplicity which has been aptly termed "wax-work literalness" in the making of poem or play. In the pastoral there was a superficial expression of the same theory, which led Dryden to centre his "All for Love" in the palace at Alexandria and to cut out the spaces of the Mediterranean.

It was characteristic also, especially of the early part of this period, to work over other men's plays; it was an age of redacteurs rather than of original authors, such as the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been. Pastoral plays offered an excellent page for mediocrity to re-write, a page which contained no real perplexities of plot or character delineation. It does not seem to have occurred to the English mind that its "bastard imitations" could be anything but an improvement upon the original. There is no begging the fact that the point of

view of the ordinary English adapter was a conceited one; even the best of French plays into which he introduced indecencies and incongruities, he was convinced the English version had much bettered. It is necessary to read only the preface to Motteux's translations (?) to see how vastly satisfied he was with his own performance. A certain reverence, however, was retained for Tasso and Guarini, so that the translations of the "Aminta" and the "Pastor Fido" have been less despoiled of their beauty than other more inconspicuous pastorals.

During this period the pastoral was intellectually a subject of some moment, and it is baffling to find the drama at its lowest ebb. There remains, to testify to an intellectual interest in the pastoral literary mode, a great profusion of eclogues. From the early seventeenth to the late seventeenth century it was, as it were, from heart to head, and the interest in pastoral literature shifted from the romance of romance and play to the scholastic exercise of writing eclogues. So far as I know, not one pastoral romance was written in England during the eighteenth century. The purposes of the eclogue had always been largely intellectual or moral rather than æsthetic; this intellectual trend is evident among our own English poets, in the didactic and religious poetry of Barclay and Googe, in the satirical and allegorical poems of Spenser, Milton, and Gay. Not only had the best interest shifted from one pastoral fashion to another, but the play, as it existed, was losing its redeeming features. Both allegory and symbolism, expressive of a certain spiritual fineness, adorned and heightened the lyric beauty of the "Aminta" or the "Faithful Shepherdess," attributes of the æsthetic which perish altogether in the coarse burlesques and vapid sentimentalities of the eighteenth century, when the aim of pastoral plays became not so much an impulse to produce something artistic as to cater to the coarse elements of vulgar audiences.

The degeneration, which is so evident, even from a brief reading of late seventeenth and of eighteenth century plays, must be accounted for in two ways: a weakness within the pastoral, that is an innate weakness, and an external influence which, had the plays remained the same, would have prevented their popularity; in short, the only condition upon which they could remain popu