blank verse, which is, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted.  I suspect that John Bancroft was a very interesting man.  He was a surgeon, and his practice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world.  He acquired, it is said, from his patients “a passion for the Muses,” and an inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he cured or killed.  The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epilogue to Sertorius, in which he says that—­

  Our Poet to learned critics does submit,
  But scorns those little vermin of the pit,
  Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit,

and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than those of the professional playwrights themselves.  He wrote three plays, and lived until 1696.  One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, laden with his secrets and his confidences.  Why did he not write memoirs, and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway really died, and what Dryden’s habits were?  Why did he not purvey magnificent indiscretions whispered under the great periwig of Wycherley, or repeat that splendid story about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave?  Alas! we would have given a wilderness of Sertoriuses for such a series of memoirs.

The volume of plays is not exhausted.  Here is Weston’s Amazon Queen, of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is The Fortune Hunters, a comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, James Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred “to be rather than to personate a hero,” and died in gallant fight for William of Orange, at the battle of Aughrim; here is Mr. Anthony, a comedy written by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in 1690, a piece never republished among the Earl’s works, and therefore of some special interest.  But I am sure my reader is exhausted, even if the volume is not, and I spare him any further examination of these obscure dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr. Johnson, that I

Set wheels on wheels in motion—­such a clatter!  To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore.

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special student of comparative literature—­namely, that it is sometimes in the minor writings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearly observed. The Amazon Queen is in rhymed verse, because in 1667 this was the fashionable form for dramatic poetry; Sertorius is in regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 the fashion had once more chopped round.  What in Dryden or Otway might be the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the age in these imitative and floating nonentities.

A CENSOR OF POETS