“They make all their schollers play-boyes!  Is’t not a fine sight to see all our children made enterluders?  Doe we pay our money for this?  Wee send them to learne their grammar and their Terence and they learne their play-bookes.  Well they talk we shall have no more parliaments, God blesse us!  But an we have, I hope Zeale-of-the-land Buzzy, and my gossip Rabby Trouble-Truth, will start up and see we have painfull good ministers to keepe schoole, and catechise our youth; and not teach ’em to speake plays and act fables of false newes.”

Studying this rather unexplored subject, one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations.  Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, “adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit,” and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit a part of his own which gave more satisfaction than the whole performance besides.

In Leland’s report of the theatricals where King James behaved so ungraciously, “the machinery of the plays,” he says, “was chiefly conducted by Mr. Jones, who undertook to furnish them with rare devices, but performed very little to what was expected.”  This is believed to have been Inigo Jones, who soon was to gain great fame as manager of the Court masques.  The entertainment was probably ingenious and splendid enough, but every one took his cue from the king’s pettishness, and poor “Mr. Jones” had to bear his share of the ill-humour.

In 1629 a Latin play was performed at Cambridge before the French ambassador.  Among the student spectators sat a youth of twenty, with long locks parted in the middle falling upon his doublet, and the brow and eyes of the god Apollo, who curled his lip in scorn, and signalised himself by his stormy discontent.  Here is his own description of his conduct:  “I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out and I hissed.”  It was the young Milton, in the year in which he wrote the Hymn on the Nativity.

Do I need to cite other precedents for the procedure at the Sweetbrier?  I grant you it cannot be done from the practice of American colleges.  The strictest form of Puritanism stamped itself too powerfully upon our New England institutions at their foundation, and has affected too deeply the newer seminaries elsewhere in the country, to make it possible that the drama should be anything but an outlaw here.  Nevertheless, at Harvard, Yale, and probably every considerable college of the country, the drama has for a long time led a clandestine life in secret student societies, persecuted or at best ignored by the college government,—­an unwholesome weed that deserved no tending, if it was not to be at once uprooted.