Madness cf ambition.

FORD (Perkin Warbeck) 1634. The huge drought of sole, self-loving, vast ambition.

MARSTON (Sophonisba 11. 2.) 1606.

The lesson which the dramatists endeavoured to inculcate is that embodied in the motto of Bacon's crest MEDIOCRIA FIRMA― Safety is in the

mean.

It is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in the mean.

SHAKESPEARE (Merchant of Venice 1. 2.) 1600. Take heed my sons, the mean is sweetest melody.

LODGE (Rosalynde) 1590. Golden mean! Her sisters two extremities Measure out a mean

Neither to melt in pleasures hot desire
Nor cry in heartless grief....

Thrice happy man who fares them both atween.
SPENSER (Fairy Queen 11. 1. 58) 1590-1609.
Pleasure's more extreme than grief. There's
nothing sweet to man but mean.

MARSTON (Dutch Courtesan v. 1.) 1605. Shun th'extremes.... keep the golden mean. HEYWOOD (London's Jus. Honorarium) 1631. Keep a mean then.

BEAUMONT & FLETCHER (Spanish Curate
v. 5.) 1622-1647.

The golden mean.

BACON (Advice to VILLIERS) 1616-1661.

Keep the mean.

NASH (Summer's Last Will) 1600.

Mediocria firma.

MARSTON (Satyres) 1598.

Mediocria firma. [Bacon's crest].

Golden mediocrity.

BACON (Advancement of Learning) 1605.

Keep a mean.... Golden mediocrity.

RANDOLPH (Muses Looking Glass I. IV and v. 1.) 1638.

This matter of pomp which is Heaven to some men is Hell to me

BACON (Letter to BUCKINGHAM) 1617.
Greatness, with private men

Esteem'd a blessing, is to me a curse
And we, whom for their births they conclude
The only freemen, are the only slaves.
Happy the golden mean! Had I been born
In a poor sordid cottage; not nursed up
With expectation to command a Court
I might, like such of your condition, sweetest,
Have ta'en a safe and middle course.

MASSINGER (Great Duke of Florence 1. 1.)
1627-1636.

Were I baser born, my mean estate
Could warrant me from this impendent harm
But to be great and happy; these are twain.
GREENE (James IV.) 1598.

I never loved ambitiously to climb..

I love to dwell betwixt the hills and dales Neither so great as to be envied

Nor yet so poor the world should pity me Inter utrumque tene medio tutissimus ibis.

NASH (Summer's Last Wil) 1600.

I ever bare in mind (in some (in some middle place

that I could discharge) to serve her Majesty. BACON (Letter to BURLEIGH) 1592.

The scourge of greatness !

SHAKESPEARE (I Henry IV. 1. 3.) 1598.

I must leave it to others to reconcile this aristocracy of feeling with the base reputation of the actors' lives. Florio, the translator of Montaigne, observes, "You shall now see them on the stage play a king, an emperor, or a duke; but they are no sooner off the stage but they are base rascals, vagabond abjects, and porterly hirelings, which is their natural and original condition."

CHAPTER VII.

MEDICINE AND PHYSIOLOGY.

"The earlier dramatists, says the historian J. R. Green, "were for the most part poor and reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame, in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, 'atheists' in general repute, holding Moses for a juggler, haunting the brothel and the alehouse and dying starved or in tavern brawls.

From internal evidence it is obvious that these phenomenal men must have wandered systematically from the alehouses to the Hall of the Barber-surgeons where alone could they have acquired the medical knowledge which they unquestionably possessed. "It is a curious fact says The British Medical Journal "that great writers speaking generally have been no lovers of the Medical profession," but to this rule the Elizabethan dramatists were conspicuous exceptions.

Shirley, Ford, and Beaumont and Fletcher, jest negligently about the pericranium; Spenser, Shakespeare, and Porter, allude to the brainpan; Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, to the pia mater; Massinger to the cerebrum and the cutis. Middleton writes familiarly of chilis, spinal medul, emunctories ginglymus, and so forth.

"How shall I do to satisfy colon?," asks Massinger in The Unnatural Combat (1. 1.). "What trick have you to satisfy colon?" enquires Heywood in Maid of the West (11. 4.). Middleton in The Chaste Maid of Cheapside (11. 2.) considers that "the colon of a gentleman should be fulfilled with answerable food," and Webster in Sir Thomas Wyatt exclaims, "O colon cries out most tyrannically, the little gut hath no mercy.

That" the schoolemasters of idleness and bawderie" should have been adepts in physiology is little less marvellous than that four of them should simultaneously have seized upon the colon -an obscure portion of the intestines as a jape within the reach of the unlettered and egregious crowd. According to Dr Murray, until Massinger revived it in 1622, the word "colon " had not been used in England since 1541. Its meaning would not improbably puzzle nine tenths of an educated audience at the present day.

Whatsoever may have been their method of acquirement it is certain that the dramatists display an acquaintance with medicine so unusual and extensive that it must have been level with, if not in advance of, the highest knowledge of

their time.

The science of Therapeutics was very much on a par with the dismal level of Learning and Religion. Even the elements of true Medicine cannot be said to have been in existence until 1628, the date of the publication of Harvey's epoch-marking discovery of the circulation of the blood. So benighted was the state of the profession that a mere statement of the facts lays one open to the suspicion of exaggeration.