paid by the proceeds of the sale of the lands, the greater part of which had then been disposed of. The swamp lands and salt water marshes of the United States present vast and almost untouched fields for this system of operations. The accumulations of vegetable matters they contain give fertility to the soil, when the stagnating waters are removed; and the success that has attended small operations undertaken to bring them into cultivation, gives encouragement to expect great results from operations undertaken upon a larger scale. The subject of drainage may be further studied in the number of Weale's "Rudimentary Series," by G. D. Dempsy, "On the Drainage of Districts and Lands." It is also treated in an article in the U. S. patent office "Agricultural Report" for 1856; and by H. Colman in his reports of European agriculture. The very complete treatise of James Donald has been recently republished in New York; and William McCammon, civil engineer of the "Albany tile works," has presented in an advertising pamphlet a summary of the principles and advantages of drainage, with exact descriptions of the tools and methods employed and estimates of cost.

DRAKE, DANIEL, an American physician, born in Plainfield, N. J., Oct. 20, 1785, died in Cincinnati, O., Nov. 5, 1852. His father, a farmer in indigent circumstances, emigrated from New Jersey to Mason co., Ky., in 1788, where Daniel's childhood and youth, up to his 16th year, were passed on a small farm, amid the labors and privations of a frontier life. In Dec. 1800, with only such education as he had received in the course of some 6 months' desultory attendance at different times upon country schools, taught by wandering and ignorant schoolmasters, he was placed under the care of Dr. William Goforth, of Cincinnati, as a student of medicine, and in 1804 he commenced the practice of that profession. In 1816 he was graduated at the university of Pennsylvania, and in 1817 he was invited to a professorship in the Transylvania medical school at Lexington, Ky., in which he lectured one session. In Dec. 1818, on his personal application, the legislature of Ohio granted a charter for the medical college of Ohio, at Cincinnati, and also established there the commercial hospital. In the autumn of 1820 the former institution was opened for students, and for 2 sessions Dr. Drake was connected with it. In 1823 he again accepted a chair in the Transylvania school; and thenceforth, till the close of his career, was with brief intermissions connected with medical schools, holding professorships in that institution, and in the Jefferson medical college, Philadelphia, in the Cincinnati medical college, in the university of Louisville, and finally, again, in the medical college of Ohio, with which he was connected at the time of his death. As a professor of the theory and practice of medicine he held an eminent position, and as a practitioner his reputation was coextensive with the Mississippi valley. His writings were voluminous, but principally of a character

not calculated or intended for permanent use. His first book, the "Picture of Cincinnati” (1815), attained in its day a wide reputation, and drew from Thomas Jefferson a highly complimentary letter. His last work, upon which his fame as an author must principally rest, was "A Systematic Treatise, historical, etiological, and practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America, as they appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian, and Esquimaux Varieties of its Population," vol. i. of which was published in 1850, and vol. ii. posthumously edited, in 1854. A memoir of his life and services, by Edward D. Mansfield, LL.D., was published in Cincinnati in 1855.

DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS, an English navigator, born near Tavistock, in Devonshire, according to some authorities in 1539, and to others in 1545 or 1546, died Dec. 27, 1595. His father, a poor yeoman, and a recent convert to the Protestant faith, obtained from Queen Elizabeth an appointment as naval chaplain. He had 12 sons, of whom Francis, the eldest, received a scanty education through the liberality of his kinsman John, afterward Admiral Sir John Hawkins, and as soon as he was old enough to serve as a cabin boy, was apprenticed to the master of a bark. By his industry and frank and decided character he so gained the affections of his master, that the latter at his death bequeathed his vessel to his young apprentice. Being thus at the age of 18 years a good sailor and the proprietor of a ship, he quickly completed his education by learning how to command, and made a commercial voyage to the bay of Biscay and afterward to the coast of Guinea. Inspired by the adventures and successes which the new world then offered, he sold his vessel and invested the proceeds with all his savings in the expedition of Capt. Hawkins to Mexico in 1567, receiving the command of the Judith. The fleet was attacked by the Spaniards, and only 2 of the 6 ships escaped. Drake, barely succeeding in sav ing his own vessel, returned to England, with a loss of his entire property, and fruitlessly petitioned the court of Spain to restore what its subjects had taken from him. Then with an oath he declared that he would obtain by force the rights which he could not get otherwise, and began to sail with the avowed object of pillaging the Spaniards. In 1570 he obtained a commission from Queen Elizabeth. In 1572 he armed 2 ships at Plymouth, with which, joined by a third at Port Pheasant, on the coast of South America, he made a descent upon New Granada, captured and plundered various Spanish settlements, and made at the expense of his enemies a fortune vastly larger than they had taken from him. He returned to England in 1573, and was welcomed as a hero. While at Darien he had seen from a mountain top the waves of the Pacific, and had there conceived the purpose of an expedition into those waters, yet unexplored by English vessels, which he now prepared to execute. His eloquence was sufficent to gain the patronage

fertilized the action. As a dramatic poet he surpassed Eschylus by a noble grace and a sweet majesty, which were wanting to the Titanic father of the drama. Fifteen years afterward Euripides enabled Greece to behold as contemporaries the three greatest purely tragic poets the world has produced. In reviewing their works we must remember that Eschylus was the creator of that fanciful world which Sophocles and Euripides so wonderfully cultivated. The dramas of Eschylus are dark, gloomy, and terrible; thunder and lightning are their atmosphere, and demigods their dramatis persona; his human beings are gigantic in moral stature, and removed above our sympathies. Sophocles, more human but not less divine, drew human nature as it ought to be. Euripides, descending still further, depicted men and women as they were.-The origin of the drama is popularly but erroneously ascribed to Thespis. This improvisatore did no more than improve upon the dithyrambus; he first organized a regular chorus, and invented dances of peculiar energy and grace; but his performances were a kind of ballet farce. Of tragedy he had no idea. The tragedy of the Greeks was a fable or a series of events begotten of each other in a natural sequence. It began with a simple position, so selected that the auditor required no explanation to understand the present condition of matters or persons; it was a simple beginning. The development of the characters was required to be simultaneous with the action, the one being involved in the other. The action should not stray from the one place beyond such a limit as the time employed in the performance might naturally permit; nor should a lapse of time take place during the piece beyond the limit of one day. These unities of action, place, and time, however, so strenuously insisted upon by the French dramatists, were not strictly observed by the Greeks, nor were they considered essential, for Eschylus himself did not always observe them. Aristotle refers indistinctly to the unity of action; he says in reference to the unity of time: "Tragedy endeavors as much as possible to restrict itself to a single revolution of the sun." Of the unity of place he says nothing. The Greek tragedy was composed in trilogies, or 3 distinct plays, continuations of each other; such, for example, was the trilogy of Eschylus, formed of the Agamemnon, the Choëphoroi, and the "Furies." In the 1st, Agamemnon, returning from the siege of Troy, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; in the 2d, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, avenges his father by the slaughter of his mother; in the 3d, Orestes is pursued by, the Furies for this unnatural deed; the gods cannot agree upon his case until Minerva decides in his favor, and releases him from the torture of the avenging divinities. These 3 subjects conjoined formed a complete action, divided into a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.-The early history of comedy is more obscure than that of tragedy. The earliest comic poet of whom we have remains is Aristophanes, who flourished a

century after Eschylus. He was the last of what was called the old school. Comedy was divided into 3 forms, the old, the middle, and the new. In the first or old comedy, the characters were real living personages, who, under their real names, were freely satirized. This license was soon so abused that a law was passed forbidding the names of real personages to be used in comedy. This impediment produced the second or middle comedy, where the prohibition was evaded by giving fictitious names to real characters, and distinguishing the individual intended to be satirized by a mask or by some unmistakable inference. The middle comedy lasted about 50 years, when it was superseded by the 3d or new comedy; in this form the characters and the subject were fictitious, and as the old satirized and ridiculed statesmen, orators, and generals under their real names, so the new was aimed at abstract vice, and not at the individual offender. As tragedy descended from the contemplation of divine matters to depict and sympathize with human woes, it gradually lost its grandeur and depreciated. So, also, as comedy divested itself of its direct influence upon men and things, and from a statesman became a philosopher, it lost its pith and power.The list of dithyrambic poets preceding Eschylus from 700 to 525 B. C. includes Archilochus, Simonides, Lasus, Arion, Stesichorus, Solon, Susarion, Hipponax, Theognis, Thespis (birth of Eschylus). Afterward came Chorilus, Phrynichus, Epicharmus, Eschylus (invents the drama, and first exhibits 499 B. C.), Chionides, Sophocles (first victory 468 B. C.), Euripides (first exhibits 455 B. C.), Cratinus, Aristarchus, Ion, Crates, Achæus, Melanippides, Pherecrates, Phrynichus the comic poet, Lysippus, Eupolis, Aristophanes (427 B. C.), Agathon, Xenocles, Ameipsias, Sannyrion, Astydamas, Antiphanes, Theopompus, Eubulus, Alexis, Heraclides, Menander (first exhibits 821 B. C.), after whom the Greek drama died obscurely.The Romans derived their drama from the Greeks. Terence, Plautus, and Seneca are the only Latin dramatists worthy of mention, and these are but translators and imitators of the Greek. The only element introduced by the Romans into the drama was farce, an invention of the Tuscans; buffoonery became more popular than wit. In truth the Roman people took little pleasure in pure intellectual amusement, and what the poet was to the Greek the gladiator was to the Roman. The coarser Roman preferred to watch the agonies of the body suffered in the circus, rather than sympathize with the woes of the soul simulated in the theatre. Thus ended the first or classic age of the drama. The second, or romantic age, gave its first indication of existence in the 12th century, when dramatic performances called entremets were introduced, as the word implies, between the services at royal banquets and carousals. These entremets soon became pageants, masks, and mummeries, and lasted as distinct dramatic entertainments up to the period of Shakespeare. Simultaneously

a dramatic composition called a Mystery, usually founded on passages of Scripture, was introduced and became a popular exhibition on saints' days. Subjects from the Bible, rudely treated in the form of a dialogue between the holy personages, were represented on a stage erected in the church or church yard, the priests and acolytes being the actors. These performances were carried to an abuse, and they became so blasphemous a scandal that they were suppressed. The next form of drama was the Morality, bearing a relation to the mystery similar to that between the new and old comedy of the Greeks. The morality was aimed at abstract vice, its action was a fable, its characters typical.-In the 15th and 16th centuries Histories began to be written-long, rambling pieces of action without form or object, but introducing rudely the design of that romantic drama destined to so wondrous a perfection under the minds of Shakespeare and his colleagues. As the classic drama was derived from the dithyramb, a pure poetic germ, subsequently developed into action, the romantic drama was derived from the pageant, mask, or mummery, a pantomimic germ, subsequently developed into poetry. In the first the action is subservient to the passion; in the second the passion is subservient to the action. Thus we find Shakespeare borrows his plots from Boccaccio, and makes his passions fit under these forms, where his characters rather encumber than assist the intrigue. In the Elizabethan age the romantic drama sprang at once into existence; and as in the single life of Æschylus the classical or Greek drama passed from infancy to maturity, so Shakespeare and his colleagues raised the romantic or Gothic drama from rudeness to the highest perfection it has ever achieved. In the romantic drama the unities of time, place, and action are not observed. The poet is allowed unbridled license; prose and poetry may be mingled without rule or reason, beyond the aptitude of each to the moment and the character. In the Greek mind the sense of form was very acute; we see it in their architecture, sculpture, and poetry; we have it in their social and political institutions. The Greek taste demanded grace of outline, proportion of parts to the whole, and was so extremely sensitive to this element in art, that we find it in all things Greek which remain to us. The Gothic mind is eminently defective in this sense. The only ideas of form we have are derived from study of the ancient models, and are not inherent in us. Reckless of form, therefore, Shakespeare depicted characters and developed passions, flung them into groups, hurried them through the action, over the possible and the impossible, and landed them on a catastrophe not prepared by design, but which suited his convenience. His works present a glorious intellectual anarchy in which he has had no follower, for the reason that no mind of less power than his own could contend with the confusion he so marvellously controls. The romantic dramatists greatly excelled their clas

sic rivals in the rich coloring of their characters; they drew men more like imperfect human beings and less like inspired statuary; and if less noble in contour, they were more truly flesh and blood. The Shakespearean characters are constructed piecemeal out of the small imperfections and humors that make up human nature; the Greek heroes are made of one piece, one passion. The English dramatists of this age gave originality at least to the form of the romantic drama, and, whatever its faults, it was new. The French and Italian poets clung to the Greek models; Corneille and Racine were but faint and poor imitators of Euripides; Alfieri affected the same ancient simplicity. As students of the Greek, their individual merit is great; but having had no share in the progress of the drama, they have no prominent place in its history. The Italians and Spaniards at this period contrived a species of performance, part pantomime, part farce, part comedy of intrigue. It was derived from those Italian narrators of whom Boccaccio is the best type, and represented dramatically those short and pithy tales in which Margaret of Navarre was wont to take such delight. Lope de Vega was the first to inaugurate this comedy of intrigue; it was quickly imitated and greatly improved by the French, who by admitting more Italian elements gave it variety and scope. Hardy, Rotrou, and Corneille, Scarron and Quinault, prepared the public taste for Molière, who truly founded and made the second or middle age of comedy, as Shakespeare and his colleagues made the first or old. Comedy at this time mainly occupied the stage. In England the four great masters, Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, brought forth the prose drama. If inferior to Molière, they were less tainted with that leaning toward Greek classicality which has always retarded the true progress of the drama in France. The most original of Molière's works is the Bourgeois gentilhomme, because in its form and treatment he has exhibited more freedom from scholastic trammel. In the beginning of the 18th century the sentimental drama, a mixture of comedy and tragedy, a weak solution, obtained great popularity, but cannot be considered a forward movement in the art. In Germany this drama obtained great popularity under Kotzebue, and at the same time a wild, mythic, philosophical dramatic form of poem was created by Goethe and Schiller. These poets have rather embellished dramatic literature than added to the development or progress of the drama as an art. Lessing, who preceded them, may be said to have founded the German drama, but he attempted no reform.-The next and last great step which the drama has made, and one that has become prominent in the present age, is the invention of opera, or a drama in which music takes the place of poetry, and the dramatic action is subservient to a new musical development. It is a mistake to presume that an opera is a musical drama. The musical form of an opera and its dramatic treatment are essentially different from