ballads by heart; he and his fellow-dramatists quote from ballads in nearly every play.' That could not be said of later authors. But the writing and even the printing of ballads of this kind, with little or no literary grace, extended to recent times, if it has quite ceased yet. In the present writer's school-days a' character' in Aberdeen hawked ballads on current events, including stranded whales (cf. No. 77), and the late Mr. Greg's collection of Folk-song in Buchan (1907) includes few ballads on the level of those in Child's volumes, many in theme and style exactly similar to those given here, or little superior. If common people are to sing at all it must be songs not beyond their artistic comprehension. As Mr. Greg insisted, the songs of Burns, Lady Nairne, Tannahill, Hogg are not folk-songs; they are folk-songs elaborated by genius and culture. The rustic knows his Burns. ... He admires his songs, and likes on occasion to hear them rendered by those who can sing them. But they are hardly for him-as songs. Like Sunday clothes or best crockery, they are too good for ordinary use.' The songs and ballads he does, or did, sing, as collected by Mr. Greg, are very similar to those which Mr. Rollins has here so carefully edited and illustrated.

Mr. Rollins also adds a considerable number of facts in Martin Parker: Additional Notes (Modern Philology, 1922) to his account of that ballad-writer which appeared in the same journal for January 1919.

Mr. George S. Catlin's interesting essay on Hobbes,21 the Matthew Arnold Memorial Essay, is more fully concerned with Hobbes as a philosopher than as a man of letters, though the latter aspect is not neglected.

From unpublished Aubrey manuscripts the Dean of Winchester, Dr. A. W. Hutton, in two articles to the Cornhill Magazine for December 1921 and the following January, supplies Some Additions to Aubrey. The first consists of two gossiping letters, both apparently to Anthony Wood, with characteristic anecdotes of

21 Thomas Hobbes as Philosopher, Publicist, and Man of Letters: An Introduction. By George E. G. Catlin. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 64. 3s. net.

the group of loyalists around Winchester and their intimates. It dates from between 1669 and 1679, perhaps before 1674, for it refers to Mr. Milton, who is ever Eikonoclastes'; there are other glimpses of Bishops Morley and Ken, Charles II, Evelyn, Pepys, and especially of Izaak Walton-Now Mr. Walton began to speak with me of his angle-the which I do confess it irks me to hear of-and of a fish which he called a samlet or skegger trout, which he said was to be caught in that stream, twenty or forty in an hour he said.... But I misdoubt Mr. Walton's success of fishing in that streamlet, for I asked Mr. Boyse the Bishop's man that was with me, and he said that not five fish had been caught in ten years there.' The second letter must date from September 1689, when Evelyn, 'that ingeniose and artificiall gardener and friend to the Church of England' was in Winchester. It discusses the attitude of various persons to the Church of Rome, James II and Laud, the Earl of Arundel and Louis XIV, and hints at arcana of a scandalous nature, not to be written down. In the January article the Dean gives three drafts such as Aubrey was in the habit of working into Brief Lives. Of Sir William Paddy (1554-1634), physician to James I and 'one of the first learned men who made a physician's practice his study, we are told that like his friend Laud 'He was a great friend to catts' and a benefactor of St. John's College. George Morley (1597-1684), bishop successively of Worcester and Winchester, a man with a bright ruddy pumpled face, and a thin disordered beard', was a friend of Evelyn, Walton, and Jonson: it was known to Aubrey, apparently on Morley's authority, that 'Ben served as a bricklayer before he became a poet. But Mr. Morley was often a helpe to him and knewe him in his old age when he was poore and sicke.' The notes on Peter Mews (1619-1706), the old cavalier bishop of Winchester who survived Aubrey, are incomplete.

We should have noticed last year a short article by Mr. A. H. Nethercot, The Relation of Cowley's' Pindarics' to Pindar's Odes (Modern Philology, August 1921). It attempts to remove three common misconceptions-that Cowley did not understand the form he was supposed to be imitating, that Congreve in his Discourse on the Pindarique Ode in 1706 first pointed out the

error, and in doing so animadverted on Cowley as the originator. But it is quite clear, from later remarks in the Discourse, that Cowley was greatly admired by Congreve, and that it was his imitators, much nearer Congreve's own time, who were adversely criticized; and even if the testimony of Bishop Sprat and others regarding Cowley's classical attainments does not conclusively prove his knowledge of Pindar's metrics, though fairly satisfactory evidence for that purpose, yet we must admit that many in the fifty years from 1656 to 1706, for example Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum, 1675, knew quite well that Cowley's Odes were not Pindaric in the strict sense at all.

IX

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700

[BY MONTAGUE SUMMERS]

DURING the year 1922, a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the Restoration period in English literature, and although the published work which may be assigned to this particular province has been with some notable exceptions, that of younger writers, and of interest rather than of importance, these new and welcome activities will, we may venture to hope, bear ripe fruit in the future.

Some account has been given in a previous chapter of Mr. Alwin Thaler's Shakespeare to Sheridan.' Here reference is therefore made mainly to details which need to be supplemented or corrected in those portions of the volume which deal with the Restoration or the period that follows. The introductory chapter 'Old Lamps and New' attempts a somewhat breathless survey of theatrical conditions, the tastes of the town and predilections of audiences, stage favourites, novelties, the growth in popularity and subsequent decline in favour of various dramatic forms from Elizabethan times to the present day. We pass rapidly from Marston and Webster to Dryden, Howard, Crowne. Rich and Garrick are given a few paragraphs apiece, and at once we find ourselves in the company of Cumberland and Monk Lewis. Finally we halt with Pinero, Jones, Synge, and Bernard Shaw. Mr. Thaler expressly disclaims any chronological arrangement, and he certainly abides by this plan, for the names are interposed in no sort of sequence.

In Chapter II, 'The Playwrights', it is confusing to find Mrs. Centlivre mentioned after Hannah More and Mrs. Inchbald with the direct implication that she wrote late in the eighteenth

See Chapter VII, p. 86-7.

century. The discussion of prologues and epilogues is so brief and so obscurely expressed that it is difficult to gather exactly what the paragraph in question is intended to convey. Above all things clarity of statement is essential when treating of these important details.

Chapter III is entitled 'The Players', and it is irritating to find that Mrs. Jordan, Henderson, Ned Shuter, and Mrs. Siddons occupy an earlier place than Mrs. Long, Cademan, and Charles Hart. To write of the individual star' (p. 70), and of Mr. Betterton 'D'Avenant's star performer and acting manager' is not merely to employ inaccurate terms, but also to confuse and mistake.

It is surprising that in his pages upon rehearsals, Chapter IV, 'The Managers', Mr. Thaler has not made use of the many important passages in Buckingham's The Rehearsal, and the numerous illuminating details from Pepys. That amusing satirical play The Female Wits; or A Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal (4to, 1704), is equally valuable in this connexion, and there is a large stock of lampoons and pasquinades, neglected by Mr. Thaler, all of which seem indispensable here. Indeed, any account of eighteenth-century rehearsals which ignores such sources must be considered to be incompletely documented.

With reference to the Restoration play-houses and later days, Chapter V, The Theatres and the Court', is superficial in treatment save where it reproduces the conclusions of former investigators. To talk about 'command-night plays' (p. 182) in the time of Charles II is, to say the least, temerarious. On p. 193 Mr. Thaler alludes to some 'manifestations of the intimate relations between the theatre and the gentry. One of them is the frequent appearance on the professional stage of this or that (unnamed) "Lady" or "Gentleman" in various important parts, the advent of such recruits being signalized always by big type in the playbills'. It is a mistake to suppose that the eighteenth-century managers applied the terms 'Lady' or 'Gentleman' in big type upon the play-bills to persons of rank and fashion. Thus, when Garrick appeared at Goodman's Fields, October 19, 1741, in Richard III, the bill announced: 'The Part of King Richard by a gentleman (who has never appeared on any Stage)', and innumerable other examples might be cited.