“His Recreation and Exercise.

“His prime pastime and recreation hath always been the exercise of mannage and weapons, which heroic arts he used to practise every day; but I observing that when he had overheated himself he would be apt to take cold, prevailed so far, that at last he left the frequent use of the mannage, using nevertheless still the exercise of weapons; and though he doth not ride himself so frequently as he hath done, yet he taketh delight in seeing his horses of mannage rid by his escuyers, whom he instructs in that art for his own pleasure.  But in the art of weapons (in which he has a method beyond all that ever was famous in it, found out by his own ingenuity and practice) he never taught any body but the now Duke of Buckingham, whose guardian he hath been, and his own two sons.  The rest of his time he spends in music, poetry, architecture, and the like.”

The value of money, and the increase of our opulence, might form, says Johnson, a curious subject of research.  In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Latimer mentions it as a proof of his father’s prosperity, that though but a yeoman, he gave his daughters five pounds each for their portion.[19] At the latter end of Elizabeth’s reign, seven hundred pounds were such a temptation to courtship, as made all other motives suspected.  Congreve makes twelve thousand pounds more than a counterbalance to the affection of Belinda.  No poet will now fly his favourite character at less than fifty thousand.  Clarissa Harlowe had but a moderate fortune.

In Sir John Vanbrugh’s Confederacy, a woman of fashion is presented with a bill of millinery as long as herself.—­Yet it only amounts to a poor fifty pounds! at present this sounds oddly on the stage.  I have heard of a lady of quality and fashion who had a bill of her fancy dressmaker, for the expenditure of one year, to the tune of, or rather, which closed in the deep diapason of, six thousand pounds!

THE EARLY DRAMA.

“It is curious to trace the first rude attempts of the drama in various nations; to observe at that moment how crude is the imagination, and to trace the caprices it indulges; and that the resemblance in these attempts holds in the earliest essays of Greece, of France, of Spain, of England, and, what appears extraordinary, even of China and Mexico.”

The rude beginnings of the drama of Greece are sufficiently known, and the old mysteries of Europe have been exhibited in a former article.  The progress of the French theatre has been this:—­

Etienne Jodelle, in 1552, seems to have been the first who had a tragedy represented of his own invention, entitled Cleopatra—­it was a servile imitation of the form of the Grecian tragedy; but if this did not require the highest genius, it did the utmost intrepidity; for the people were, through long habit, intoxicated with the wild amusement they amply received from their farces and moralities.