he 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
worth while? It was not for mirth merely that the old professors and
teachers countenanced the drama. To the editors of _David's Harp_
I have sent this passage from Milton, noblest among the Puritans,
and have besought them to lay it before their consistory: "Whether
eloquent and graceful incitements, instructing and bettering the
nation at all opportunities, not only in pulpits, but after another
persuasive method, in theatres, porches, or whatever place or way, may
not win upon the people to receive both recreation and instruction,
let them in authority consult." The German schoolmasters and
professors superintended their boys in the representation of
religious plays to instruct them in the theology which they thought
all-important; in the performance of Aristophanes and Lucian, Plautus
and Terence, mainly in the hope of improving them in Greek and Latin:
and when the plays were in the vernacular, it was often to train their
taste, manners, and elocution. Erasmus and the Oxford and Cambridge
authorities certainly had the same ideas as the Continental scholars.
So the English schoolmasters