It has long been the fashion, when Cymbeline has been under discussion, to cite Dr. Johnson's famous criticism, and indeed one feels a whimsical joy in setting down so delightful a bit of square-toed dogmatism. “This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” The really significant thing, however, which makes this opinion worth repeating, is that so many of the best modern critics have expressed substantial agreement with it. Sir Walter Raleigh thinks that “Johnson speaks truly and moderately,” and Dr. H. H. Furness said, “Ay, Dr. Johnson was right in his estimate of this play of Cymbeline,—the sweetest, tenderest, profoundest of almost all the immortal galaxy.” Most writers, while not agreeing directly with Johnson, have taken a half-puzzled, half-apologetic attitude; they have obviously felt what Dr. Furness calls “deterioration” here, after the splendid achievement of the great tragedies and the Roman plays.

Scarce ane has tried the shepherd-sang
But wi' miscarriage.
Burns's Poem on Pastoral Poetry.

Wordsworth saw common things with “unaccustomed eyes.” When he gazed upon the landscape about him or when be observed the life of people in humble station, he found many a feature which his predecessors had overlooked or neglected. Nature, he perceived, had been ignored or superficially regarded. Yet Nature, to his mind, deserved the best efforts at interpretation. Similarly, country folk of low degree he found had hearts as sensitive as those of -people in high places, and accordingly he undertook to proclaim the truth to the world. He wished to enforce his own doctrine : “Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility for the delight, honour, and benefit of human nature ! ”

To those who look askance when the drama of the last forty years of the seventeenth century is mentioned, it may be a doubtful honor to connect a minor Restoration playwright with the early history of America. But the fact remains that John Crowne, one of the most prolific of the dramatists of this period, was for three years a resident of New England and a student at Harvard College. He is now remembered chiefly as the author of Sir Courtly Nice, a comedy which held the boards for almost a hundred years.

The similarities of phrase, arrangement, and general development that are to be observed in so many mediæval religious plays in which divergences are nevertheless equally apparent have been variously explained as due to the common scriptural, liturgical, theological, or vernacular sources of these plays. Nor has the possibility that one play or cycle may have borrowed directly from another been overlooked. The paucity of early texts, however, contrasted with the relatively more abundant remains of the later highly developed plays and cycles, has tended to obscure the whole problem. With the recent discovery and publication of the oldest text of a complete French Passion play that has survived—the manuscript is dated from the beginning of the fourteenth century by Dr. Christ— new data has become available, and it can be shown, I think, from the relations existing between this so-called Palatine Passion and other French Passion plays that many of the puzzling resemblances in the medieval drama arise from the fact that the same texts often served as the basis for the representations given in different communities. These texts were at various times subjected to revision, and it is the successive alterations made upon them which have in many eases concealed their original connections.