to their feet, set off with pearl and gold, the loveliest girls of
France declaimed and sang the sonorous verse. It is really one of the
most innocent and charming pictures that has come down to us of this
age, when so much was hollow, pompous, and cruel.

Hamlet says to Polonius, "My lord, you played once in the university,
you say." To which Polonius replies, "That I did, my lord, and was
accounted a good actor. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the
Capitol." Do not suppose, Fastidiosus, that the playing of Polonius
was any such light affair as you and I used to be concerned in up in
the fourth story of "Stoughton," when we were members of the Hasty
Pudding. In the Middle Ages, in convents and churches, flourished the
mysteries; but, says Warton, in the _History of English Poetry_,
as learning increased, the practice of acting plays went over to the
schools and universities. Before the sixteenth century we may find
traces of dramatic vitality among the great English seminaries; but if
the supposition of Huber, in his account of English universities,
is correct, the real founder of the college drama in England was a
character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus,
as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at
Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations
out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom
complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face
and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he
stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many other
things he did while in England, lent an important impulse to the
acting of plays by students. He, no doubt, was no further interested
than to have masterpieces of Greek and Latin drama represented, that
the students might have exercise in those languages; but before the
reign of Henry VIII. was finished, the practice was becoming pursued