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learned from these, — respecting Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, Corio- 

 lanus, Cleopatra, Hamlet the Dane, and others, — he re-modelled, so as 

 to fit them for those who were auditors only, not readers. Dramatic 

 entertainments were, therefore, a great means of popular advancement 

 at that period; just as, some centuries before, the curious "miracle 

 plays" had been at Chester, Coventry, and other cities. They were got 

 up by the clergy, and acted by the trades'-people, in order to familiarize 

 the populace with the facts in Scripture history. In the seventeenth and 

 the early part of the eighteenth century, the varieties differed little from 

 those of the present day ; but the supply was different, and the grade 

 less advanced. Broadsides were still numerous, but a higher class was 

 fast supplanting them. Every trifling event gave rise to a pamphlet or 

 tract ; and these were so numerous that it was sometimes impossible, 

 then as now, to collect all that were issued on one particular subject. 

 Their multiplicity was owing to the fact tliat the modem newspaper was 

 unknown. Each of fifty articles which now appear in the Times would 

 have formed the subject of a tract. One recorded "a most cruell 

 shipwreck," that had happened on some part of our coasts, the title-page 

 serving for a table of contents. Another told of the burning of a house, 

 with dubious stories of the number of persons consumed in their beds ; 

 and a third kept crowds of listeners in mute astonishment, as it recorded 

 feats of witchcraft, and the punishment of some one whose want of youth 

 and good looks had left her a prey to vulgar superstition. Another 

 recorded the siege of a foreign town by an eye witness, and was headed 

 by a glaring woodcut, perhaps quite as correct as some of those in our 

 own illustrated periodicals. There were popular songs in great numbers, 

 with and without music, records of monsters, wonderful cures, extm- 

 ordinary lives and deaths, and narratives of the discoveries of strange 

 lands. We may smile at these productions, as we do at the wigs 

 buckles and ponderous canes of our grandfathers : but let us not forget 

 that they have all in turn and time served their purpose. 



The term " Literature" is sometimes used in an extended sense, our 

 English literature including works on mathematics, astronomy, and 

 chemistry ; and " Science," in like manner, is made to refer to the 

 systematic treatment of almost any subject, as the science of history, 

 geography, or music. Speaking more strictly, science proceeds from 

 simpler prmciples to more complicated, and each step requires an 

 acquaintance with the previous ones ; literature, on the contrary, consists 

 of portions which are in a great degree independent of each other. 

 Even before this distinction existed, and when both were classed under 

 the common head of knowledge, that which was possessed by the more 

 learned differed from that which was possessed by the less, not only in 

 degree or quantity, but in kind. 



