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And Master Tom Heywood, the play-writer, came out with a great slice of fresh wheat-bread, thick with butter and dripping with yellow honey, and gave it to Nick; and stood there silently with a very queer expression watching him eat it, until Carew's groom led up a stout hackney and a small roan palfrey to the block, and the master-player, crying impatiently, "Up with thee, Nick; we must be ambling!" sprang into the saddle of the gray.

Oh, what clever men there are in the world in London, at least! He is a play-writer, too. I wonder my husband comes not. Does Mr. Vane does Mr. Vane admire this actress?" said she, suddenly. "Mr. Vane, madam, is a gentleman of taste," said he, pompously. "Well, sir," said the lady, languidly, "she is not here." Triplet took the hint and rose.

Clarendon, with a sneer at Davenant's profession of play-writer, makes merry over the choice of such an agent by the Queen, Jermyn, and Colepepper, and relates the result with some malice. Arrived at Newcastle late in September, or early in October, Davenant had delivered his letters to the King, and proceeded to argue according to his instructions.

Genuine, serious illness, inseparable from suffering and ending in death, is neither a cheerful, an interesting, nor a dramatic episode, except in very small doses, like a well-staged death-bed or a stroke of apoplexy, and does not furnish much valuable material for the novelist or the play-writer.

And in knowing this Venetian much may be learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her walls with sweet and splendid works expressive of the endurance and piety of great souls, but such men as Casanova the gambler, Goldoni the play-writer, Longhi and Canaletto the painters; and then, as the best among them all, the honest Venetian whom we now meet, sometimes called the Shakespeare of Venice, but in fact only a play-writer, a Venetian nobleman, who depicted in a dispassionate temper the trivialities of his age, and lacked both the milieu and the material to produce a great work.

Beaumarchais, a play-writer and adventurer, was made an unofficial agent of France; and through him arms and supplies from royal arsenals came into the hands of the Americans. More to the purpose, money was placed at the disposal of the envoys. In 1776 a million francs were thus secured; in 1777 two millions.

The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the Queen's favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was 'one of such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.

Being a play-writer and constant theatre-goer, his mind was full of theatrical reminiscences. He remembered at that moment to have noticed that peculiar twitch, that odd expression of countenance, in Sarah Bernhardt when she was acting the part of a profoundly jealous woman. It had then meant, "Go to my rival, to her whom you love, and be comforted do not come to me!"

He lived long enough to see the hostility which had opposed him in youth die away, and honor and kindness take its place. Let it be repeated, his aims were good. He would have been candid and un-selfconscious had that been possible for him; and perhaps the failure was one of manner rather than of heart. Yes, he was a fortunate man. His most conspicuous success was as a play-writer.

At first d'Éon had all the social advertisement which was now his one desire, but he became a nuisance, and, by his quarrels with Beaumarchais, a scandal. In drawing-room plays he acted his English adventures with the great play-writer, whose part was highly ridiculous. Now d'Éon pretended to desire to 'take the veil' as a nun, now to join the troops being sent to America.