thinking less of his Aurelia and his Valentius
than of the lost common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no more
revisited.

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious. It is the
_Usurper_, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon.
Edward Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in-law. Edward
Howard is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poem
of _The British Princes_:

_A vest as admired Vortiger had on,
Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won_.

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing
Vortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already.
But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden
himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events,
the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of _The British Princes_ is
before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly
runs:

_Which from this island's foes his grandsire won_.

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep,
follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries.
The _Usurper_ is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, "a most perfidious
villain," plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last,
much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L.
Stevenson, "There's an end of that."

But though the _Usurper_ is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier
lees of wit in the _Carnival_, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of
1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be
more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little
thing interesting to a modern student. The _Carnival_ has one such
peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the
stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's _Churchyard
Elegy_. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly
occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and
counter-marches of the Civil War.

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in
our volume really repays us for pushing on so far. Here is a piece of
wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of
Newcastle's _Humorous Lovers_:

_At curfew-time, and at the dead of night,
I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright,
Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow
To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo
To darker caves and