e entrances being of single
stones. In a few the opening is at the top, with rude projections
resembling a staircase to aid in the descent. Cinerary urns have been
found in some of them, yet they do not appear to have been originally
constructed as tombs. The Romans may have afterwards turned them to that
service. In the vicinity there are the remains of a Druid circle, of
large upright monoliths. These singular structures were formerly much
more numerous, the people (who call them "the altars of the Gentiles")
having destroyed a great many in building the village and the
neighboring farm-houses.

I heard a great deal about a cavern on the eastern coast of the island,
beyond Arta. It is called the Hermit's Cave, and the people of Palma
consider it the principal thing to be seen in all Majorca. Their
descriptions of the place, however, did not inspire me with any very
lively desire to undertake a two days' journey for the purpose of
crawling on my belly through a long hole, and then descending a shaky
rope-ladder for a hundred feet or more. When one has performed these
feats, they said, he finds himself in an immense hall, supported by
stalactitic pillars, the marvels of which cannot be described. Had the
scenery of the eastern part of the island been more attractive, I should
have gone as far as Arta; but I wished to meet the steamer Minorca at
Alcudia, and there were but two days remaining.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Souvenirs d'un Voyage d'Art a l'Isle de Majorque._ Par J.-B.
Laurens.

MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.

In the present paper we propose to consider six dramatists who were more
immediately the contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have
the precedence in time, and three of them, if we may believe some
critics, not altogether without claim to the precedence in merit, of
Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. These are Heywood,
Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman.

They belong to the school of dramatists of which Shakespeare was the
head, and which is distinguished from the school of Jonson by essential
differences of principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite
external rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical
understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the keeping of his
characters were called in question. Shakespeare constructed his, not
according to any rules which could be drawn from the practice of other
dramatists, but according to those in