e sense of beauty lay for generation and generation, germinating in
the intellects and hearts of men; and, when the time came, a whole
harvest of it was gathered at one time in the statues and pictures and
temples of ancient Greece. But it was only the greater and more
flourishing portion of the increase that grew in that birth-place of
gods and heroes. The seed was scattered over a wider surface; and, if we
could recover proofs of it, I should not at all fear to bet you two
half-pints to one, that there were sculptors and painters in Asia and in
Egypt, equal, in their several manners, to Phidias and Apelles. When
printing, in the same way, had lain in furrow the proper time, the first
blades of it began to appear in many regions at the same period. With
steam it is the same; and, when the next invention is brought into
practical use, it will be found that the thought of it had agitated
hundreds of minds by the Rhine, by the Thames, by the Hudson, and
perhaps by the sacred Ganges, or the still more sacred Nile.

I think I hear your deep sepulchral tones in the exclamation of, "All
that 'ere is rubbage--cut it short!" and it is my intention, my dear
Smith, to cut it short at once. When the drama's time was come, the
whole of civilized Europe saw the glorious birth. In Spain and in
England the soil was found most congenial; and the theatre in those
countries took at once its place as the best possible instructor--next,
of course, to the church--and its lessons were inculcated by the
inspired possessors of the art, Lope de Vega and Shakspeare. The
Spaniard was born in 1566--the Englishman two years earlier; so that,
allowing both to have reached the maturity of their powers at thirty
years of age, and to have retained them twenty years, the appointed hour
for the perfection of the drama was the end of the sixteenth century and
the beginning of the next. Now, my dear Smith, cast your luminous eye
over the state of society at that period. Lope was a volunteer on board
of the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare, perhaps, saw Elizabeth ride forth to
review the troops at Tilbury. Middle-aged men, with whom Shakspeare
conversed in his youth, had seen the execution of Anne Boleyn. Old
fellows, with whom both of them associated, had been present at the
Field of the Cloth of Gold. And, above all, they had both of them
watched, but with very different hopes, the ferocious progress of the
Duke of Alva, and heard the echoes of the battle-cry of