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.

I do not advocate, Fastidiosus, a return to the ancient state of
things, which I doubt not was connected with many evils; but is there
not reason to think a partial revival of the old customs would be