fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the
king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a
pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the
queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who
was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.

The practice of acting plays prevailed in the schools as well. The
visitor to Windsor will remember in what peace, as seen from the great
tower, beyond the smooth, dark Thames, the buildings of Eton lie
among the trees. Crossing into the old town and entering the school
precincts, where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations
of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf
where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in
larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall.
In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the
boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come
up afterward by the hundred to be historic men. There are still the
fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained glass,
the superb wood carving, the dais at the end. If there were no other
memory connected with the magnificent hall, it would be enough that
here, about 1550, was performed by the Eton boys, _Ralph Roister
Bolster_, the first proper English comedy, written by Nicholas
Udal, then head-master, for the Christmas holidays. He had the name
of being a stern master, because old Tusser has left it on record that
Udal whipped him,--

"for fault but small,
or none at all."

But the student of our old literature, reading the jolly play, will
feel that, though he could handle the birch upon occasion, there was
in him a fine genial vein. This was the first English comedy. The
first English tragedy, too, _Gorboduc_, was acted first by
students,--this time students of law of the Inner Temple,--and the
place of performance was close at hand to what one still goes to see
in the black centre of the heart of London, those blossoming gardens
of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in
them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the
voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the
turgid lines of Sackville's piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring
which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed. From Lincoln's Inn, in
1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the electo