from the attack of Essex upon the ships at Cadiz. This was another carrying out of the suggestion Chapman made in a note when using a simile drawn from the struggle of war before Nimeguen. Thus came George Chapman in mid-life into our literature, marked for strength among the strong. His early life would be worth knowing, but we only know that it had been tried by adversity. He was poor when he began to publish, and although he was impatient of the dominance of "Custom, that the apoplexy is Of bed-rid natures and lives led amiss " Chapman's --he described it so in "Hero and Leander "—he had as a poor poet to fall in with the custom of finding words for the players. Meres names him in his list of the best writers of comedy and tragedy. George Chapman's "Blind Beggar of Alexandria," which remains to us, was first acted in February, 1596, and first printed in 1598. Henslowe found it profitable. Other plays of his are named in Henslowe's Diary, but they are lost. There remains "A Humorous Day's Mirth," first printed in 1599. It is probable that he wrote also before. 1599, under another title, the excellent comedy, Fools," based upon Terence's Heautontimoroumenos. this was not printed until 1605. Plays. "All But John Webster is among workers at plays mentioned after November, 1601, in Henslowe's Diary ; but they are lost plays, and, as we know him, he is dramatist of the reign of James I. John Thomas Heywood may have been about twenty years. Thomas old when he was first mentioned in Henslowe's Diary as receiving thirty shillings for a Heywood. playbook, towards the close of the year 1596. In 1598 he was engaged as a regular member of the Lord Admiral's company. His "First Part of Edward IV." was printed in 1600, and "The Four 'Prentices of London," written in his youth, was printed in 1601. Heywood's activity was very great. He said, in 1633, that he had an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in 220 plays. But the two here named are all that remain of what he wrote under Elizabeth. Except his "Woman Killed with Kindness," which was first acted in 1603, Thomas Heywood's place is mainly in the literature of the reign of James I. and Charles I. Thomas Thomas Middleton was about thirty-two years old in the year of the death of Elizabeth, and belongs chiefly to the reign of James I. He was the only son of William Middleton, a gentleman settled in London, by his wife Anne, daughter of William Snow. In 1597 Thomas Middleton published "The Wisdom of Solomon paraphrased," and not improved by the process. In 1599 he followed the fashion of the day, and published "Microcynicon, Six Snarling Satires." He is first mentioned by Henslowe, in May, 1602, as fellow-worker on a lost play, "Cæsar's Fall," with Munday, Drayton, Webster, and others, and in a play of "The Two Harpies," with Munday, Drayton, Dekker, and Webster. An excellent comedy, "The Old Law," known only in an edition of 1656, in which Middleton and Rowley worked together, has been ascribed to the last years of Elizabeth. William Rowley was another of the young dramatists who earned money by work for the theatres at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and grew to their full powers in the reign of James. John Ford was seventeen years old, Philip Massinger was twenty, William Francis Beaumont nineteen, and John Fletcher twentyfour in the year of the death of Queen Elizabeth. None of them became dramatists until the reign of James. With these young men there passed into the reign Thomas of James I. the old poet Thomas Churchyard, who, to the new generation living in the last years of Elizabeth, represented literature as it had been in diebus illis, when the queen was young. We left him* in 1579 publishing "Chips." In that year new wealth of thought was rising, and Spenser published his first book. Churchyard liked to alliterate on title-pages with the "Ch" that began his name. If his name had not been Churchyard, he would not have called his pieces "Chips," or set up in 1580 "A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance," or, in the same year, entitled a light bundle of lively discourses "Churchyard's Charge; " nor would the collection of pieces, issued in 1593, that included vindication of his right to be regarded as the author of "Shore's Wife," have been entitled "Churchyard's Challenge." Churchyard wrote many occasional pieces, but was most esteemed in his old age for that poem of Shore's wife, which he had contributed in his youth to "The Mirror for Magistrates." † Among his later poems was one published in 1587, in a variety of measures, with some intermixed prose, on "The Worthiness of Wales." It treats of towns, castles, rivers, mountains, and matter of interest in the antiquities of Wales and its marches, not omitting Shropshire, for Churchyard was born in Shrewsbury. To leave that out "were double error plaine. If in thy pen be any poets vayne, Or gifts of grace from skies did drop on thee, Then Shrewsebrie towne thereof first cause must bee." Churchyard's age was about eighty-three when he published a "Paan Triumphall upon the King's publick entry from the Tower of London to Westminster,” and he published two pieces in the following year- the year "E. W." viii. 249–260. +E. W." viii. 247--251. of his death—one of them containing "sad and heavy verses in the nature of an Epitaphe for the losse of the Archbishop of Canterbury." John Whitgift died in that year at the age of seventy-four, on the twenty-ninth of February. Churchyard survived him but a month, for he was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster, on the fourth of April. Anthony Anthony Munday, whom we left in the year 1586,* was fifty years old at the end of Elizabeth's reign. He lived beyond the reign of James, into the reign of Charles I., and died in 1638. Munday published in 1588 "A Banqvet of Daintie Conceits; furnished with verie delicate and choice Inventions to delight their Minds who take Pleasure in Musique; and there-withall to sing sweete Ditties, either to the Lute, Bandora, Virginalles, or anie other Instrument." He published also some translations, and in the last years of Elizabeth's reign was active among younger men in endeavour to earn money as a playwright. Two Robin Hood plays, printed in 1691, the "Downfall" and the "Death” of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, may have been written by Munday and Chettle, but have been ascribed also to Heywood. Richard Barnfeild. Richard Barnfeild, who lived through the reign of James, and died a country gentleman, at Dorlestone, Staffordshire, in 1627, at the age of fifty-three, produced poems only in his younger days under Elizabeth. He was born in June, 1574, at Norbury, Shropshire, eldest son of a gentleman of the same name. His mother, whose maiden name had been Maria Skrimsher (Scrimgeour), died when he was six years old. At the age of fifteen, in November, 1589, Barnfeild entered Brasenose College, Oxford, and he took his Bachelor's degree in February, 1592. He came to London, and had friends among the poets when he published, at the age * "E. W." ix. 154-162. 66 of twenty, in November, 1594, his first little book of verse, "The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the loue of Ganymede." He signed himself only Daphnis under the dedication to Lady Rich. But in his next book of poems, published in January, 1595, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra," Richard Barnfeild signed his name to its dedication to the Earl of Derby, and to the epistle "To the curteous Gentlemen Readers," which began by acknowledging that he had written "The Affectionate Shepheard." In 1598, at the age of twenty-five, Barnfeild published "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money. By Richard Barnfeild, Graduate in Oxford." Of this there was a new edition, with alterations and additions, in 1605, including a few stanzas that honoured the new reign. He published nothing more. The fuller title of Barnfeild's first piece is "The Teares of an affectionate Shepheard sicke for Loue; or, The Complaint of Daphnis for the Loue of Ganimede." It is in two parts, the second being called, "The second Dayes Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepheard." Both parts are an expansion by the young poet of Virgil's second eclogue in which Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim. Alexis becomes Ganymede, and the old man's love for the beautiful boy, whatever Virgil meant by it, becomes, in the first part of Barnfeild's rendering, a musical fancy in stanzas of six-lined common verse, not without some inspiration from the four-lined stanzas of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," which it resembles a little in its artificial daintiness of pastoral suggestion. In the second day's lamentation love grows to good counsel from age to youth, and Virgil's nimium ne crede colori: Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur, is developed at some length into a paradoxical plea for the advantage of black over white, according to the fashion that suggested to Dekker his |