castle, her disguise remaining
undiscovered. This produces a temporary difficulty, the lady of the
castle falling in love with her knightly patient; but that trouble is
soon removed, without leaving any harm behind. The King of England
invades Scotland on behalf of his ill-used daughter; a reward is offered
for her recovery; and on the eve of battle she appears as a peacemaker.
Happiness crowns the story.

The interest and value of the play lies in the two characters, Ida and
Dorothea. In the outline given above small space is assigned to the
former because her part is almost entirely confined to minor scenes in
which she and her mother talk together over their fancy-work, and
Eustace pays successful court for her hand. But by her purity and
maidenly reserve she merits our attention. It is a pity that her virtue
makes her rather dull and prosaic. Dorothea's adventures in disguise
show Greene profiting perhaps by the example of Peele, although the loss
of so many contemporary plays warns us against naming models too
definitely. The popularity of disguised girls in later drama and their
appearance in the works of Peele, Lyly and Greene, point to their having
been early accepted as favourites whenever an author sought for an easy
addition to the entanglement of his plot. Faithful love in the face of
desertion and cruelty is the dominant note in Dorothea's character as it
was in that of Angelica.--Slipper and Nano, two dwarf brothers, engaged
as attendants respectively on Ateukin and Queen Dorothea, provide most
of the humour. More worthy of note are Oberon, King of the Fairies, and
Bohan, the embittered Scotch recluse, who together provide an Induction
to the play. We are reminded of the Induction to _The Taming of the
Shrew_. Ben Jonson also makes use of this device. In this particular
Induction the story of James the Fourth is supposed to be played before
Oberon to illustrate the reason of Bohan's disgust with the world; but
these two persons recur several times to round off the acts with fairy
dances and dumb shows, which have no reference to the main play. In
Greene's verse we discover a half-hearted return to rhyme, passages in
it, and even odd couplets, being interspersed plentifully through his
blank verse.

To make amends for our slight notice of Ida in the outline of the play
we select our illustration from a scene in that lady's home.

[_The_ COUNTESS OF ARRAN _and_ IDA _discovered in their porch,
s