King James, however, received it all coldly.  The University, kindled by the traditions of Elizabeth’s visit, did its best.  Leland gives a glimpse of the stage arrangements in Christ Church Hall.  Towards the end “was a scene like a wall, painted and adorned by stately pillars, which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other painted cloths, their stage did vary three times.”  But the king liked the scholastic hair-splitting with which he was elsewhere entertained better than the plays.  In Christ Church Hall he yawned and even went to sleep, saying it was all mere childish amusement.  In fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.

The practice of acting plays prevailed in the schools as well.  The visitor to Windsor will remember in what peace, as seen from the great tower, beyond the smooth, dark Thames, the buildings of Eton lie among the trees.  Crossing into the old town and entering the school precincts, where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall.  In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come up afterward by the hundred to be historic men.  There are still the fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained glass, the superb wood carving, the dais at the end.  If there were no other memory connected with the magnificent hall, it would be enough that here, about 1550, was performed by the Eton boys, Ralph Roister Bolster, the first proper English comedy, written by Nicholas Udal, then head-master, for the Christmas holidays.  He had the name of being a stern master, because old Tusser has left it on record that Udal whipped him,—­

  “for fault but small,
  or none at all.”

But the student of our old literature, reading the jolly play, will feel that, though he could handle the birch upon occasion, there was in him a fine genial vein.  This was the first English comedy.  The first English tragedy, too, Gorboduc, was acted first by students,—­this time students of law of the Inner Temple,—­and the place of performance was close at hand to what one still goes to see in the black centre of the heart of London, those blossoming gardens of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the turgid lines of Sackville’s piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed.  From Lincoln’s Inn, in 1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the elector-palatine and went off to Heidelberg Castle, the students came to the palace with a piece written by Chapman, and the performance cost a thousand pounds.