in the most attenuated Cyprus lawn, bespangled with jewels, had to
slide down upon invisible wires from a visible Olympus; Tritons had to
rise from the halls of Neptune through waters whose undulations the
nicer resources of recent art could not render more genuinely marine;
fountains disclosed the most bewitching of Naiads; and Druidical oaks,
expanding, surrendered the imprisoned Hamadryad to the air of
heaven. Fairies and Elves, Satyrs and Forsters, Centaurs and Lapithae,
played their parts in these gaudy spectacles with every conventional
requirement of shape, costume, and behavior _point-de-vice_, and were
supplied by the poet, to whom the letter-press of the show had been
confided, with language and a plot, both pregnant with more than
Platonic morality. Some idea of the magnificence of these displays,
which beggared the royal privy-purse, drove household-treasurers mad,
and often left poet and machinist whistling for pay, may be gathered
from the fact that a masque sometimes cost as much as two thousand
pounds in the mechanical getting-up, a sum far more formidable in the
days of exclusively hard money than in these of paper currency. Scott
has described, for the benefit of the general reader, one such pageant
among the "princely pleasures of Kenilworth"; while Milton, in his
"Masque performed at Ludlow Castle," presents the libretto of another,
of the simpler and less expensive sort. During the reign of James, the
passion for masques kindled into a mania. The days and nights of
Inigo Jones were spent in inventing machinery and contriving
stage-effects. Daniel, Middleton, Fletcher, and Jonson were busied
with the composition of the text; and the court ladies and cavaliers
were all from morning till night in the hands of their dancing and
music masters, or at private study, or at rehearsal, preparing for the
pageant, the representation of which fell to their share and won them
enviable applause. Of course the burden of original invention fell
upon the poets; and of the poets, Daniel and Jonson were the most