of weapons; and
though he doth not ride himself so frequently as he hath done, yet he
taketh delight in seeing his horses of mannage rid by his escuyers, whom
he instructs in that art for his own pleasure. But in the art of weapons
(in which he has a method beyond all that ever was famous in it, found
out by his own ingenuity and practice) he never taught any body but the
now Duke of Buckingham, whose guardian he hath been, and his own two
sons. The rest of his time he spends in music, poetry, architecture, and
the like."

The value of money, and the increase of our opulence, might form, says
Johnson, a curious subject of research. In the reign of Edward the
Sixth, Latimer mentions it as a proof of his father's prosperity, that
though but a yeoman, he gave his daughters five pounds each for their
portion.[19] At the latter end of Elizabeth's reign, seven hundred
pounds were such a temptation to courtship, as made all other motives
suspected. Congreve makes twelve thousand pounds more than a
counterbalance to the affection of Belinda. No poet will now fly his
favourite character at less than fifty thousand. Clarissa Harlowe had
but a moderate fortune.

In Sir John Vanbrugh's Confederacy, a woman of fashion is presented with
a bill of millinery _as long as herself_.--Yet it only amounts to a poor
fifty pounds! at present this sounds oddly on the stage. I have heard of
a lady of quality and fashion who had a bill of her fancy dressmaker,
for the expenditure of one year, to the tune of, or rather, which closed
in the deep diapason of, six thousand pounds!

THE EARLY DRAMA.

"It is curious to trace the first rude attempts of the drama in various
nations; to observe at that moment how crude is the imagination, and to
trace the caprices it indulges; and that the resemblance in these
attempts holds in the earliest essays of Greece, of France, of Spain, of
England, and, what appears extraordinary, even of China and Mexico."

The rude beginnings of the drama of Greece are sufficiently known, and
the old _mysteries_ of Europe have been exhibited in a former article.
The progress of the French theatre has been this:--

Etienne Jodelle, in 1552, seems to have been the first who had a tragedy
represented of his own invention, entitled Cleopatra--it was a servile
imitation of the form of the Grecian tragedy; but if this did not
require the highest genius, it did the utmost intrepidity; for the
people were, through long h