to memory.

As Captain Talbot had foretold, the boys' sport was quite sufficiently
punished by being made into earnest. Master Sniggius was far from
merciful as to length, and his satire was so extremely remote that
Queen Elizabeth herself could hardly have found out that Zenobia's fine
moral lecture on the vanities of too aspiring ruffs was founded on the
box on the ear which rewarded poor Lady Mary Howard's display of her
rich petticoat, nor would her cheeks have tingled when the Queen of the
East--by a bold adaptation--played the part of Lion in interrupting the
interview of our old friends Pyramus and Thisbe, who, by an awful
anachronism, were carried to Palmyra. It was no plagiarism from
"Midsummer Night's Dream," only drawn from the common stock of
playwrights.

So, shorn of all that was perilous, and only understood by the
initiated, the play took place in the Castle Hall, the largest
available place, with Queen Mary seated upon the dais, with a canopy of
State over her head, Lady Shrewsbury on a chair nearly as high, the
Earl, the gentlemen and ladies of their suites drawn up in a circle,
the servants where they could, the Earl's musicians thundering with
drums, tooting with fifes, twanging on fiddles, overhead in a gallery.
Cis and Diccon, on either side of Susan Talbot, gazing on the stage,
where, much encumbered by hoop and farthingale, and arrayed in a yellow
curled wig, strutted forth Antony Babington, declaiming--

"Great Queen Zenobia am I,
The Roman Power I defy.
At my Palmyra, in the East,
I rule o'er every man and beast"

Here was an allusion couched in the Roman power, which Master Antony
had missed, or he would hardly have uttered it, since he was of a Roman
Catholic family, though, while in the Earl's household, he had to
conform outwardly.

A slender, scholarly lad, with a pretty, innocent face, and a voice
that could "speak small, like a woman," came in and announced himself
thus--

"I'm Thisbe, an Assyrian maid,
My robe's with jewels overlaid."

The stiff colloquy between the two boys, encumbered with their dresses,
shy and awkward, and rehearsing their lines like a task, was no small
contrast to the merry impromptu under the oak, and the gay, free grace
of the children.

Poor Philidaspes acquitted himself worst of all, for when done up in a
glittering suit of sham armour, with a sword and dagger of lath, his
entir