it; on the other hand, his earlier manner, as exhibited in The Arraignment of Paris, evidently helped to inspire the style of Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and was afterwards extended by Ben Jonson in his Masques. Peele's Old Wives' Tale, in itself a poor performance, contains the germ of Milton's Comus.

The son of a silversmith in London, but descended from a gentle family in Devonshire, George Peele was born in 1558. He was entered first at Broadgates Hall -afterwards Pembroke College-Oxford; but became a student of Christ Church in 1573, where he took his B.A. degree in 1577, and proceeded to his M.A. degree in 1579. At Oxford he wrote his Tale of Troy, which he did not publish, however, till 1589, and his fame as a poet seems to have been established in the University, for when Albertus Alasco, the Polish Prince Palatine, visited it in 1583, Peele with others was selected to entertain him with a comedy, entitled Rivales, and a tragedy on the subject of Dido. After this year he appears to have lived in London, supporting himself mainly by the devising of pageants or the writing of plays. In 1584 his Arraignment of Paris was acted before the Queen by the children of the chapel; in 1585 he devised the pageant for the Lord Mayor's show. When Essex and his troops in 1589 set sail for Spain, Peele wrote a "Farewell" for them, in blank verse, full of the enthusiasm which had animated the nation since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the previous year; and on Essex's return he welcomed him with An Eclogue Gratulatory in the semiarchaic pastoral style, which had been made fashionable by Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. He was at this time one of the actors in the Blackfriars Theatre, having a house opposite on the Bank-side, where he lived with his wife and daughter; and I imagine that during this period most of his surviving plays were written. His Chronicle of Edward the First and his Battle of Alcazar (if it be his), both probably produced some time after 1590, show unmistakable traces of the influence of Marlowe; the Old Wives' Tale, though it was not printed till 1595,

might be taken for an earlier production, though a hexameter line in it, quoted in ridicule from Gabriel Harvey, looks like a reference to the quarrel which began in 1592 between that person and Thomas Nash.1 David and Bethsabe, not printed till 1599, when Peele was dead, was, I doubt not, written after the appearance of Tamburlaine. Peele was one of the companions of Greene and Marlowe, and resembled them in the manner of his life. He appears to have been in his day almost as celebrated as Theodore Hook for his practical jokes, but the wit in most of these, if they are truly reported, would in latter times have found its proper appreciation in a police court. He died, according to Meres,2 of disease, towards the close of the sixteenth century.

Two only of Peele's dramas require detailed notice, The Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe. The former is of special interest as an example of the classicalromantic play, composed mainly for the gratification of the learning and vanity of Elizabeth, after the Moralities had fallen into their decline, and before Tamburlaine had given a new stimulus to the public taste. In respect of its subject it belongs to the school of Lyly, but it is constructed with great ingenuity out of a variety of materials. It is divided into five Acts, in the orthodox manner of Seneca, whose influence is also visible in the Prologue, spoken by Ate, who announces the curse which is to fall on Troy from

The fatal fruit

Raught from the golden tree of Proserpine.3

But the first Act is full of a charming stream of pastoral verse, in which Pan, Faunus, Silvanus, Pomona, and Flora, prepare to welcome the rival goddesses on Mount Ida. The following beautiful passage shows the spirit

and style of their discourse :

1 O that I might,—but I may not, woe to my destiny therefore! From G. Harvey's Encomium Lauri; quoted in ridicule by Huanebango in Peele's play.

2 Palladis Tamir (1598), Shakspere Allusion Books, part i. p. 164. 3 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 351.

Not Iris in her pride and bravery
Adorns her arch with such variety;

Nor doth the milk-white way, in frosty night,
Appear so fair and beautiful in sight,

As done these fields and groves and sweetest bowers,
Bestrewed and decked with parti-coloured flowers.
Along the bubbling brooks and silver glide,

That at the bottom do in silence slide;
The water-flowers and lilies on the banks,

Like blazing comets, burgen [burgeon] all in ranks ;
Under the hawthorn and the poplar tree,
Where sacred Phoebe may delight to be,
The primrose, and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet, and the wholesome minth,
The double daisy, and the cowslip, queen
Of summer flowers, do overpeer the green;
And round about the valley as ye pass,

Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass:
That well the mighty Juno, and the rest,
May boldly think to be a welcome guest

On Ida hills, when, to approve the thing,

The Queen of Flowers prepares a second spring.1

Paris and none appear as pastoral lovers, and sing a melodious song of "Cupid's curse." In the second Act the goddesses present themselves to Paris for the award, and after a show of pageants, like those in The Tempest, the apple is adjudged. The third Act introduces a new element in the discourse of the Spenserian shepherds, Hobbinol, Diggon, and Thenot, who bewail the death of Colin from love, in consequence of the cruelty of the shepherdess Thestylis. Mercury also appears to Enone, now forsaken by Paris, and tells her that he is sent to summon the faithless shepherd to account for his award before the council of the gods. The council is held in the fourth Act, the scene being Diana's bower on Ida; Paris makes an oration in blank verse before the assembly, pleading the irresistible power of beauty; and the gods, considering the original question to be still open, debate it with much heat; till at last Apollo suggests that the judgment as to woman's worthiness must be given by a woman, and that Diana, to whom the region belongs, shall be appointed arbitress. This proposal being

1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 352.

agreed to, opens the way to a splendid compliment to Elizabeth in the fifth Act, in which Diana "describes the Nymph Eliza, a figure of the Queen":

It is enough and, goddesses, attend.

There wons within these pleasant shady woods,
Where neither storm nor sun's distemperature
Have power to hurt by cruel heat or cold,

Under the climate of the milder heaven,

Where seldom lights Jove's angry thunderbolt,
For favour of that sovereign earthly peer;

Where whistling winds make music 'mong the trees,—
Far from disturbance of our country gods,
Amid the cypress-springs, a gracious nymph,

That honours Dian for her chastity,

And likes the labours well of Phoebe's groves;
The place Elyzium hight, and of the place
Her name that governs there Eliza is ;

A kingdom that may well compare with mine,
An ancient seat of kings, a second Troy,
Y-compassed round with a commodious sea :
Her people are y-clepèd Angeli,

Or, if I miss, a letter is the most:

She giveth laws of justice and of peace;
And on her head, as fits her fortune best,

She wears a wreath of laurel, gold, and palm :

Her robes of purple and of scarlet dye,

Her veil of white as best befits a maid:

Her ancestors live in the House of Fame :

She giveth arms of happy victory,

And flowers to deck her lions crowned with gold.

This peerless nymph whom heaven and earth belove,

In whom do meet so many gifts in one,

On whom our country gods so often gaze,

In honour of whose name the Muses sing;

In state Queen Juno's peer, for power in arms,
And virtues of the mind, Minerva's mate;
As fair and lovely as the Queen of Love,
As chaste as Dian in her chaste desires :
The same is she, if Phoebe do no wrong,
To whom this ball in merit doth belong.1

Of course the justice of this sentence is at once perceived.
Venus, Pallas, and Juno resign their claims, and the three
Fates "deliver the ball of gold to the Queen's own hands."

In this admirable piece, fancy, taste, and scholarship

1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 368.

unite to promote the required end; and it may safely be pronounced that a more exquisite tribute of poetical flattery was never offered upon any stage. The Arraignment of Paris is a monument of the extent and limitation of

Peele's dramatic powers. His genius was the product of the love of pageantry and masquerade, a legacy of the allegorical tradition of the Middle Ages, which was deeply rooted in the taste of the English people under Elizabeth. He was a master of whatever was pictorial and external in theatrical art. As a dramatic rhetorician he was hardly, if at all, inferior to Marlowe; in wealth of poetic diction, warmth of fancy, and richness of invention, he perhaps excelled all his contemporaries whose names are usually coupled with his own. But in the higher creative powers he was deficient. His plays contain no character that rouses the affection; no imaginative situation that awakens the interest; no universal sentiment that touches the heart. Whatever can be done by fancy, taste, knowledge and judgment, Peele does, and his excellences and defects are nowhere better seen than in his David and Bethsabe.

His vast intellectual superiority to Greene is apparent when we compare this drama with Greene's Scriptural play, A Looking Glass for London. Both plays are plainly inspired by Marlowe's Tamburlaine. But whereas Greene seizes crudely on Marlowe's external characteristics, and, following the bent of his own nature, introduces vaunting kings merely in order afterwards to plunge them into affliction, and purge them with repentance, Peele perceives that, in the representation of lawless will, the new poet has discovered a dramatic principle capable of almost limitless extension. He avails himself of it, but unlike Marlowe, keeps his imagination within due bounds, and never loses sight of the old tragic principle of the consequences of sin. His admirable judgment is shown in the selection of his subject, which at once gave him scope for sounding eloquence in the speeches assigned to such characters as Absalom, Shimei, and Achitophel, and enabled him to preserve a moral balance in the progress of the action. His contrasts are developed with great

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