His food ambrosia-no earthly woman's milk:
Sweet fires of cinnamon to dress him by ;
The Graces on his cradle should attend ;
Venus should make his bed and wait on him,
And Phoebus' daughter sing him still asleep.
Thus would I have my boy used as divine,
Because he is King Edward's son and mine:
And do you mean to make him up in frieze?"

The cruelty to the Lady Mayoress of London, who is tied by Elinor's order to a chair and has two adders put to her breast, comes in towards the end of the play, out of an old ballad, very much by the by, as prelude to the proud lady's sinking in the earth at Charing Cross and being cast up alive again at Pottershithe, thenceforth to be called after her, Queenhithe. There is much more than is here suggested; anything, in fact, that would keep the stage going and please the people seems to have been taken as it came. The wit and poet, perhaps, had his prompter by him in a tankard, and in his lines, therefore, the prompter may be answerable for a little of the incoherence that is almost throughout to be found in the printed copy.

Peele's
Minor
Poems.

Among Peele's other pieces were a stray poem, “The Praise of Chastity," gathered into the "Phoenix Nest" in 1593; another in "England's Helicon;" another in "England's Parnassus." A pastoral of the Hunting of Cupid is known only by fragments. Also Peele wrote the verses for two allegorical pageants upon Lord Mayor's Day in London-one for the Lord Mayor Woolston Dixi(e) in 1585; another-Descensus Astrææ— written for the Lord Mayor William Web(be) in 1591. "Polyhymnia" was printed in 1590, as "Describing the honour

"Polyhymnia."

able Triumph at Tylt before her Maiestie, on the 17 of November last past, being the first day of the three and thirtieth yeare of her Highnesse raigne. With Sir Henrie Lea his resignation of honour at

Tylt, to her Maiestie, and received by the right honorable
the Earle of Cumberland." Sir Henry Lea, Master of
the Queen's Armoury, son of Sir Thomas Wyatt's sister
Margaret, was the first inventor of the annual exercises in
the tilt yard at Westminster, on the seventeenth of No-
vember, in celebration of the queen's accession to the
throne;
and on the occasion celebrated by the verses of
George Peele, Sir Henry Lea, aged about sixty (he lived to
be eighty), resigned his office to the Earl of Cumberland.
Thirteen couples ran in the tilt. Peele celebrates each. The
fifth couple was the Earl of Essex and Sidney's friend,
Fulke Greville-

"Fair man at arms, the Muses' favourite,
Lover of learning and of chivalry,

Sage in his saws, sound judge of poesy."

When Sir Charles Blount tilts as one of the sixth couple, there is glance at his relations with Lady Rich

"Comes Sir Charles Blount in or and azure dight;

Rich in his colours, richer in his thoughts,

Rich in his fortune, honour, arms, and art."

One of the last couple that ran was Master Everard Digby. Then the day closed, and the poem on it, with "old Henry Lea," knight of the crown, dismounting, taking off his armour, and kneeling to pray for the appointment of "the flower of English knights, the valiant earl," as his successor. The queen assented to the prayer of her good woodman, whose green was turned to grey. The poem closed with the prayer that England might live to have many such champions, and Elizabeth as many days and years as she in heart could crave. A little poem followed of three six-lined stanzas on the loyal servant of the queen withdrawn from arms in his old age

"His golden locks time hath to silver turned,

O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
G---VOL, X.

His youth gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned,

But spurned in vain ; youth waneth by increasing :
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen,
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

"His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,
And lovers' sonnets turn to holy psalms,
A man at arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers which are Age his alms :
But though from court to cottage he depart,
His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

“And when he saddest sits in homely cell,

"The Honour of the Garter."

He'll teach his swains this carol for a song ;
Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well,
Cursed be the souls that wish her any wrong:
Goddess, allow this aged man his right

To be your bedesman now, that was your knight."

In 1593 Peele celebrated also in a poem, "The Honour of the Garter," the installation of the Earl of Northumberland, then twenty-nine years old, as knight of the order. Peele dedicated the poem to the earl as "the Muses' love, patron, and favourite," addressing him in the title to the prologue as Mæcenas. That prologue, lamenting the neglect of poets,

"For other patrons have poor poets none
But Muses and the Graces to implore,"-

names Sidney and Walsingham as patrons dead; and as poets, Spenser, "Great Hobbinol, on whom our shepherds gaze;" Sir John Harrington, whose verse-translation of Ariosto's "Orlando" was first printed two years before; Daniel, "Rosamond's trumpeter, Sweet as the nightingale ;" Campion and Fraunce, Watson, and lastly Marlowe, whose death was then the latest grief—

Fit to write passions for the souls below,

If any wretched souls in passion speak."

The poem itself follows, in which Peele represents himself as seeing a vision in his sleep of Edward III., founder of the Order of the Garter, followed to Windsor by its famous knights of old, in honour of the installation of their new comrade on the morrow. And Peele's dream came to him, he says, after

"I laid me down, laden with many cares,

My bedfellows almost these twenty years."

Here, as the old saga men used to say of one whose part in a tale was ended, George Peele goes out of the story. Let us turn next to the last records of Robert

We have traced the

Robert

Greene.
sequence of Greene.
Greene's novels to the publication of "Mena-

phon" in 1589.* We have taken note also of the play of Alphonsus," † in which he may have first turned to the stage, influenced by the success of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," and of " A Looking Glass for London and England," written by Greene and Lodge. Greene's other plays that have come down to us are "Orlando Furioso," "James the Fourth," "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," "George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield," and, very likely, "The First Part of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks."

66

was first printed in 1594, without suggestion of an author's name, as it was played by the Queen's Majesty's Players." Its whole title is "The First part of the Tragicall raigne of Selimus, sometime Emperour of the Turkes, and grandfather to him that now raigneth. Wherein is shown how hee most vnnaturally raised warres against his owne father Baiazet, and preuailing therein, in the end caused him to be poysoned. Also with the murthering of his two brethren, Corcut, and Acomat.”

Dr. Grosart has included "Selimus" in his edition of Greene's works chiefly because he has found that it contains two passages (numbered 4 and II), one on Delay ("He that will stop the brook," etc.), the other on Damocles, which are quoted as from Robert Greene in “England's Parnassus," published in the year 1600. It is true that quotations in this work are now and then assigned to a wrong author; but the inference from these two quotations is that Robert Allott, or whoever else made these two quotations, looked upon "Selimus" as one of the plays of Robert Greene, and probably it was. The piece is of the Tamburlaine school. Selim's father Bajazet refers in his distress to

"That woful emperor first of my name
Whom the Tartarians locked in a cage,
To be a spectacle for all the world,"

and counts himself much more unfortunate,

"For Tamburlaine the scourge of nations

Was he that pulled him from his kingdom so;
But mine own sons expel me from the throne."

Selim, the youngest son, who rises by the killing of his father and his brothers, speaks of himself as "none of those who make a conscience for to kill a man," and when he is emperor, at his command his follower, "Stern Sinam Basha," reduces the number of the dramatis persona sensibly by incidental stranglings on the stage. There is more rhyme in "Selimus" than is usual in such plays, but the author knew very well how to bombast out a blank verse. Bajazet's eldest son, Acomat, says of his father that he means to

"Fill all the confines with fire, sword, and blood,

Burn up the fields, and overthrow whole towns,

Then tear the old man piece meal with my teeth
And colour my strong hands with his gore-blood.
Aga. O see, my lord, how fell ambition

Acomat.

Deceives your senses and bewitches you;
Could you unkind perform so foul a deed
As kill the man that first gave life to you?
Do you not fear the people's adverse fame ?
It is the greatest glory of a king

When, though his subjects hate his wicked deeds,
Yet are they forced to bear them all with praise."