SONG.--Cupid's Curse. From the 'Arraignment of Paris.'

CENONE-PARIS.

CENONE. Fair, and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be,

The fairest Shepherd on our green,
A love for any lady.

PARIS. Fair, and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be,
Thy love is fair for thee alone,
And for no other lady.

EN. My love is fair, my love is gay,
And fresh as bin the flowers in May,
And of my love my roundelay,
My merry, merry, merry roundelay,
Concludes with Cupid's curse:

Peele died before 1599, and seems, like most of his dramatic brethren, to have led an irregular life, in the midst of severe poverty. A volume of Merry Conceited Jests,' said to have been by him, was published after his death in 1607, which, if even founded on fact, shews that he was not scrupulous as to the means of relieving his wants.

THOMAS KYD.

In 1588, THOMAS KYD produced his play of Hieronimo' or ' Jeronimo,' and some years afterwards a second part to it, under the title of The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again.' This second part is supposed to have gone through more editions than any play of the time. Ben Jonson was afterwards engaged to make additions to it, when it was revived in 1601, and further editions in 1602. These ew scenes are said by Lamb to be the very salt of the old play,' and so superior to Jonson's acknowledged works, that he attributes them to Webster, or some more potent spirit' than Ben. This seems refining too much in criticism. Kyd, like Marlowe, often verges upon bombast, and 'deals largely in blood and death.' Nothing seems to be known of his personal history.

HIERONIMO mad, for the loss of his murdered son.

HIERONIMO. My son and what's a son?

A lump bred up in darkness, and doth serve
To balance those light creatures we call women;
And at the nine months' end creeps forth to light.
What is there yet in a son,

To make a father dote, rave, or run mad?

Being born, it pouts, cries, and breeds teeth.

What is there yet in a son?

He must be fed, be taught to go, and speak.

Ay, or yet? why might not a man love a calf as well?
Or melt in passion o'er a frisking kid, as for a son?
Methinks a young bacon,

Or a fine little smooth horse-colt,

Should move a man as much as doth a son;

For one of these, in very little time,
Will grow to some good use; whereas a son
The more he grows in stature and in years,
The more unsquared, unlevelled he appears;
Reckons his parents among the rank of fools,
Strikes cares upon their heads with his mad riots,
Makes them look old before they meet with age;
This is a son; and what a loss is this, considered truly!
Oh, but my Horatio grew out of reach of those
Insatiate humours; he loved his loving parents:
He was my comfort, and his mother's joy,
The very arm that did hold up our house-

Our hopes were stored up in him;

None but a damned murderer could hate him.

He had not seen the back of nineteen years,

When his strong arm unhorsed the proud prince Balthazar;`

Aud his great mind, too full of honour, took

To mercy that valiant but ignoble Portuguese.

Well, Heaven is Heaven still!

And there is Nemesis, and furies.

And things called whips,

And they sometimes do meet with murderers;

They do not always 'scape--that's some comfort.

Ay, ay, ay, and then time steals on, and steals, and steals
Till violence leaps forth, like thunder

Wrapt in a ball of fire,

And so doth bring confusion to them all.

JAQUES and PEDRO, Servants.

JAQUES. I wonder, Pedro, why our master thus At midnight sends us with our torches light,

When man and bird and beast are all at rest,

Save those that watch for rape and bloody murder.

PEDRO. O Jaques, know thou that our master's mind

Is much distract since his Horatio died:

And, now his aged years should sleep in rest,
His heart in quiet, like a desperate man
Grows lunatic and childish for his son:
Sometimes, as he doth at his table sit,
He speaks as if Horatio stood by him;
Then starting in a rage, falls on the earth,
Cries out: Horatio, where is my Horatio ?'
So that with extreme grief, and cutting sorrow,
There is not left in him one inch of man.
See, here he comes.

HIER. What make you with your torches in the dark?

FED. You bid us light them, and attend you here.

HIER. No, no; you are deceived: not I; you are deceived,

Was I so mad to bid you light your torches now?

Light me your torches at the mid of noon,

When as the sun-god rides in all his glory;
Light me your torches then.

[Exit

PED. Then we burn daylight.

HIER. Let it be burned: Night is a murderous slut,
That would not have her treasons to be seen:
And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon,
Doth give consent to that is done in darkness.
And all those stars that gaze upon her face,
Are aglets (1) on her sleeve, pins on her train:
And those that should be powerful and divine,
Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine.

PED. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words.
The heavens are gracious; and your miseries

And sorrow make you speak you know not what.
HIER. Villain! thou liest: and thou doest nought
But tell me I am mad: thou liest; I am not mad:

I know thee to be Pedro; and he, Jaques.

I'll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I?

Where was she the same night when my Horatio was murdered? She should have shone: search thou the book.

Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know, nay, I do know had the murderer seen him,

His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth,

Had he been framed of nought but blood and death.
Alack! when mischief doth it knows not what,
What shall we say to mischief?

ISABELLA, his wife, enters.

ISABELLA. Dear Hieronimo, come in a-doors.
O seek not means to increase thy sorrow.

HIER. Indeed, Isabella, we do nothing here.
I do not cry; ask Pedro and Jaques:
Not I indeed; we are very merry, very merry!
ISA. How? be merry here, be merry here?
Is not this the place, and this the very tree,
Where my Horatio died, where he was murdered?
HEIR. Was, do not say what let her weep it out.
This was the tree; I set it of a kernel;

And when our hot Spain could not let it grow,

But that the infant and the human sap

Began to wither, duly twice a morning

Would I be sprinkling it with fountain water;

At last it grew and grew, and bore and bore:

Till at length it grew a gallows, and did bear our son.
It bore thy fruit and mine. O wicked, wicked plant!
See who knocks there.

PED. It is a painter, sir.

[One knocks within at the door.

HIER. Bid him come in, and paint some comfort,
For surely there's none lives but painted comfort.
Let him come in: one knows not what may chance.
God's will that I should set this tree! but even so
Masters ungrateful servants rear from nought,
And then they hate them that did bring them up.
The Painter enters.

PAINTER. God bless you, sir.

HIER. Wherefore? why, thou scornful villain? How, where, or by what means should I be blest? ISA. What wouldst thou have, good fellow?

PAIN. Justice, madam.

HIER. O ambitious beggar, wouldst thou have that That lives not in the world?

1 Tags of points.

Why, all the nndelved mines cannot buy

An ounce of justice, 'tis a jewel so inestimable.

I tell thee, God hath engrossed all justice in his hands,

And there is none but what comes from him.

PAIN. O then, I see that God must right me for my murdered son.

HIER. HOW! was thy son murdered?

PAIN. Ay, sir; no man did hold a son so dear.

HIER. What, not as thine? that's a lie,

As massy as the earth. I had a son,

Whose least unvalued hair did weigh

A thousand of thy sons, and he was murdered.
PAIN. Alas, sir, I had no more but he.

HIER. Nor I, nor I; but this same one of mine
Was worth a legion. But all is one.

Pedro, Jaques, go in a-doors; Isabella, go;
And this good fellow here and I

Will range this hideous orchard up and down,
Like two she-lions, 'reaved of their young.
Go in a-doors, I say.

[Exeunt.

THOMAS NASH.

THOMAS NASH, a live' satirist, who amused the town with his attacks on Gabriel Harvey and the Puritans, wrote a comedy called 'Summer's Last Will and Testament,' which was exhibited before Queen Elizabeth in 1592. He was also concerned with Marlowe in writing the tragedy of 'Dido, Queen of Carthage.' He was impris oned for being the author of a satirical play, never printed, called the 'Isle of Dogs.' Another piece of Nash's, entitled the 'Supplication of Pierce Penniless to the Devil,' was printed in 1592, which was followed next year by Christ's Tears over Jerusalem.' Nash was a native of Lowestoft, in Suffolk, and was born about the year 1564; he was of St. John's College, Cambridge. He died about the year 1600, after a life spent,' he says, in fantastical satirism, in whose veins heretofore I misspent my spirit, and prodigally conspired against good hours.' He was the Churchill of his day, and was much famed for his satires. One of his contemporaries remarks of him in a happy couplet:

His style was witty, though he had some gall;
Something he might have mended, so may all.
Return from Parnassus.

The versification of Nash is hard and monotonous. The following is from his comedy of Summer's Last Will and Testament,' and is a favourable specimen of his blank verse: great part of the play is in prose:

I never loved ambitiously to climb,

Or thrust my hand too far into the fire,
To be in heaven sure is a blessed thing;

But. Atlas-like, to prop heaven on one's back,
Cannot but be more labour than delight,
Such is the state of men in honour placed;
They are gold vessels made for servile uses;

High trees that keep the weather from low houses,

But cannot shield the tempest from themselves
I love to dwell betwixt the hills and dales,
Neither to be so great as to be envied,

Nor yet so poor the world should pity me.

In' Pierce Penniless,' Nash draws a harrowing picture of the despair of a poor scholar:

Ah, worthless wit! to train ne to this woe:
Deceitful arts that nourish discontent:
Ill thrive the folly that bewitched me so!
Vain thoughts, adieu! for now I will repent-
And yet my wants persuade me to proceed,
For none take pity of a scholar's need.
Forgive me, God, although I curse my birth,
And ban the air wherein I breathe a wretch,
Since misery hath daunted all my mirth,

And I am quite undone through promise' breach;
Ah, friends!-no friends that then ungentle frown
When changing fortune casts us headlong down.

'Men

On this subject, Nash was always fluent. He was an author by profession-careless, jovial, and dissipated—alternating between riotous excess and abject misery. His ready and pungent pen was at the service of any patron or cause that would pay, but he was generally in want. In his 'Pierce Penniless,' he thus paints his situation in 1592: 'Having spent many years in studying how to live, and lived a long time without money; having tired my youth with folly, and surfeited my mind with vanity, I began at length to look back to repentance, and addressed my endeavours to prosperity; but all in vain. I sat up late and rose early, contended with the cold and conversed with scarcity; for all my labours turned to loss: my vulgar muse was despised and neglected; my pains not regarded, or slightly rewarded; and I myself in prime of my best wit, laid open to poverty' The condition of the times Nash describes as lamentable. of art,' he says, must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best, to be kept under by dunees, who count it a policy to keep them bare, because they should follow their books the better.' But he is quite willing to let himself out to one of these wealthy dunces: Gentles, it is not your lay chronographers, that write of nothing but mayors and sheriffs, and the Dear Year and the Great Frost, that can endow your names with never-dated glory, for they want the wings of choice words to fly to heaven, which we have; they cannot sweeten a discourse, or wrest admiration from mere reading, as we can, reporting the meanest accident. Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of all wits, and the very phrase of angels: how much better is it, then, to have an eloquent lawyer to plead one's case than a strutting townsman, who loseth himself in his tale, and does nothing but make legs; so much it is better for a nobleman or gentleman to have his honour's story related and his deeds emblazoned by a poet than a citizen. For my part, I do challenge no praise of learning to