tic economies often sacrifice all charm and aesthetic appeal.
His gray world leaves no hope save the desperate one that conditions
so grim may shame and spur society to reform.

Stephen Phillips.--This dramatist and poet was born at Somerton,
near Oxford, in 1864. The boy was sent to Shakespeare's birthplace,
Stratford-on-Avon, to attend school. He entered Cambridge, but at the
end of his first term he left the university to join a company of
Shakespearean players. His six years with them initiated him into the
technique of stagecraft, which he later applied in the writing of his
poetic dramas.

[Illustration: STEPHEN PHILLIPS.]

Before producing the plays for which he is known, he wrote some
narrative and lyric verse. _Marpessa_ (1890), a blank verse poem, is a
beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god,
and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the
lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world,
where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. In some of his
non-dramatic poems, _Christ in Hades_ (1896), _Cities of Hell_ (1907),
and _The New Inferno_ (1896), Phillips shows how the subject of life
and punishment after death attracts him.

With the appearance of his _Paolo and Francesca_ in 1899, the poetic
drama seemed phoenix-like to arise from its ashes. Tennyson and
Browning had failed to write successful plays. In fact, since the
death of Dryden, poetry and drama had seemed to be afraid to approach
each other. Phillips effected at least a temporary union. His several
plays have distinctly dramatic qualities and many passages of poetic
beauty. From both a dramatic and a poetic point of view, _Paolo and
Francesca_ is Phillips's best play. Its dramatic values lie chiefly in
its power to create and sustain a sense of something definitely
progressing toward a certain point. The poetic elements of the play
consist in the beauty of atmosphere and the charm of the lines.
Giovanni Malatesta, the ugly tyrant of Rimini, being at war when his
marriage draws near, sends his young brother Paolo to escort Francesca
to Rimini. On the journey Paolo and Francesca fall in love with each
other. When Giovanni discovers this, his jealous hand slays them. To
such a tragic climax, Phillips drives steadily onward from the first
scene, thus focusing the interest on a concrete dramatic situation.

_Herod_ (1900) is a drama of ambition versus love. Herod, the great
his