of hunger gnawing through the principles and firm resolves that partition a life of honor and self-respect from one darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by open shame.  Happy,—­ yet, perhaps, oh, unhappy,—­he who now in such a strait can wield the pen of a ready writer!—­for the press, perchance, may afford him a support which, though temporary and precarious, will hold him up until he can stand upon more stable ground.  But in the reigns of Good Queen Bess and Gentle Jamie there was no press.  There was, however, an incessant demand for new plays.  Play-going was the chief intellectual recreation of that day for all classes, high and low.  It filled the place of our newspapers, our books, our lectures, our concerts, our picture-seeing, and, in a great measure, of our social gatherings and amusements, of whatever nature.  It is hardly extravagant to say, that there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year.  To play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated, entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and their condition.  They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular plays for them on festal days.  What more natural, then, than that those who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts, should give themselves up to play-writing!  As do the great, so will the small.  What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do.  The players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic in the matter of play-making.  If a play filled the house, they did not trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who wrote it; and thus came about that “common practice” for “shifting companions” to “leave the trade of Noverint” and “busy themselves with the endeavors of art”; and hence it is that the plays of the period of which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law.

[Footnote E:  It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash’s object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,—­one or more of them,—­whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581.  It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.]