evil by good, is the bringing together of Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, and Miranda, Prospero's daughter. This is done by Ariel. He first gets Ferdinand separated from the rest of the passengers and crew, and then he makes himself invisible, and flies before him in the air, singing—

"Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands :
Courtsied when you have, and kissed

(The wild waves whist),

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear."

Ferdinand follows the magic song, and Ariel leads him towards Prospero's cave. As he approaches it, Ariel sings

"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,

Hark! I hear them-Ding-dong, bell.”

The thought of his father calls up sorrow into Ferdinand's face; and just at that moment Miranda lifts her eyes and sees him. She is touched at once by pity for him; and the pure love which springs up in the two young hearts is the beginning of that higher feeling which at last joins all the discordant elements into sweet harmony.

Prospero sees that the charm will work; but first he tests the love of Ferdinand for Miranda by sacrifice, humility, labour, and obedience. He refuses to believe he is the young prince. He treats him as an imposter, and sets him to do Caliban's work of carrying heavy logs of wood, and piling them up before the cave before the sun sets. Ferdinand has never done any work before, but he forgets he is a prince, and toils cheerfully to accomplish the task Miranda's father

has set him, for his love for her makes the labour light and pleasant, and he bears patiently Prospero's hard words.

In the meantime the rest of the passengers in the ship are dispersed in two groups over the island. These two groups represent the world in which Prospero is now seeking again to live and do his work. And it is not an ideal world, in which it is delightful to live and in which there is nothing to do, but it is the world as Shakespeare saw it around him, and in which he strove to do his work. The first group represents the courtly world of the day, with its ambition, its selfish plotting, its bitterness and satire; the second stands for the lower side of life, with its stupidity, coarseness, and drunkenness. The first group consists of the King of Naples; Sebastian, his brother; Antonio, brother of Prospero, and usurping Duke of Milan; Gonzalo, and other courtiers. As they wander through the island, and the king is mourning for Ferdinand as dead, a plot is laid by the king's brother Sebastian, and Antonio, Duke of Milan, to kill the king while he is asleep. Sebastian is then to be made King of Naples, and Antonio is to hold his dukedom free from tribute to the king. But as the king and Gonzalo sleep, and Antonio has drawn his sword ready to kill them, Ariel wakes them with a song. In the midst of thunder and lightning, Ariel, in the shape of a harpy, sets before "the three men of sin" the wrong which has been done to Prospero. The thought of their misdeeds presses so heavily upon them, that they are driven to the verge of madness, and their deep repentance is the second step towards the overcoming of evil by good. The other group is composed of Stephano, the king's butler; Trinculo, his jester; and Caliban. In their coarseness and ignorance for them, too, self-interest is the principle of life. The height of their ambition is to possess the barren, desolate island, in which the drunken butler is to be king; but it is ambition still. They plot to kill Prospero, and take the island for

themselves.

Ariel defeats the conspiracy, by playing in the air upon a tabor and pipe, and leading Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban into a stagnant pool.

Ariel then tells Prospero of all that he has done, and Prospero sends him to bring the king and his party to his cave, where he receives them in his old dress as Duke of Milan. A reconciliation between the brothers takes place, and Antonio restores the dukedom to Prospero. The king asks his pardon for the part he took in his banishment, and Prospero brings him to his son, whom he mourned as lost in the shipwreck; and it is arranged that Ferdinand shall marry Miranda. The three men are released by Ariel from their mud bath in the stagnant pool, and the sailors from their sleep under the hatches of the ship. It is found that the ship has been put into complete order again, and is ready for sea.

Prospero releases Ariel from the spell which binds the spirit to his service, and asks him to call up fair breezes for their homeward voyage to Italy. Prospero now abjures his magic, breaks his magic wand, and resolves to drown his book of charms in the depths of the sea. Henceforth he will live as Duke of Milan, holding his true relation to his fellow-men, and ruling wisely for their good.

Thus Shakespeare shows the final triumph of good after many years of apparently successful wrong. The charm of the play itself, its bright fancy, and deep thought, it is impossible to give in any sketch of it. It is supposed to have been Shakespeare's last.

We have taken Shakespeare as representing the highest dramatist of the Elizabethan time, but there were some among his contemporaries who must not be forgotten. The chief of these is Ben Jonson. His father was a Puritan preacher; but he knew more of his step-father, a bricklayer, whom his mother married when Ben Jonson was only two years old. He had a good education in Westminster School,

Then he

provided for him by Camden, the historian.

served in the war in the Netherlands, which was being carried on against the tyranny of Philip II. On his return to London he joined the players. Like Shakespeare, he acted and altered plays, until he found his own power as a dramatist. One of his first plays was a comedy, Every Man in his Humour, first acted in 1596. Jonson was a man with a strong sense of what was right, and had an honest hatred of every kind of folly or affectation. This is powerfully shown in his three next plays, which were satires: Every Man out of his Humour was directed against the follies of London life; Cynthia's Revels exposed the affectations of Elizabeth's Court; and The Poetaster dealt with the false aims and tricks of Art in Literature. In 1603 he produced a tragedy, Sejanus; and in James I.'s reign he wrote other comedies and some masques.

In all his work Ben Jonson strove with manliness and courage to lead men to live for more serious aims, and to give the earnestness and labour bestowed on surface trifles to deeper things. He endeavoured constantly to make them more true to an independent standard of perfection, and to free them from the slavish subjection to the custom and fashion of the hour. He thus expresses what he desires to

do for men in his work

"That these vain joys, in which their wills consume

Such powers of wit and soul as are of force

To raise their beings to eternity,

May be converted on works fitting men ;
And, for the practice of a forcéd look,
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase,
Study the native frame of a true heart,
An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge,
And spirit, that may conform them actually

To God's high figures, which they have in power."

Ben Jonson's honesty and scorn for everything false and base held him steadfast to his own purposes and standard,

in the times of the Stuarts, when the stage became degraded to the lower tone of the Court of James I., and not falling in with the current of the day, the old dramatist, who had begun his work in Elizabeth's time, sank into neglect. He died in 1637, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. A friend of his commissioned a mason to carve on the stone above his grave the words, "O rare Ben Jonson," which still remain as his most fitting epitaph, in its simple honesty and freedom from the flattering phrases he would have so much disliked and despised.