376 Elbert N.S. T. hompson 
The earliest, and in many respects the most interesting, of the 
humanists’ plays is The Nature of the Four Elements, which was 
written about the year 1519 to expound “many proper points of 
philosophy natural, and of divers strange lands, and of divers strange 
effects and causes.” For this schooling the well-tried machinery 
of the morality worked admirably. A central figure, Humanity, 
places himself under the tutelage of Natura Naturata and Studious 
Desire, and listens to their lectures on the nature of the four ele- 
ments, the size of the earth and its position in the solar system, and 
the cause of tides and other natural phenomena. Later Experience 
is introduced by them as a widely traveled scholar to carry on 
the demonstration of the rotundity of the earth, and to exhibit on 
a “figure,” or globe, “ certain points of cosmography ” that Humanity 
should know. 
An interested reader can fancy the attention that this geography 
lesson would draw from the spectators. It would be to them an 
explorer’s tale. 
This sea is called the Great Ocean, 
So great it is that never man 
Could tell it, since the world began, 
Till now, within this twenty years, 
Westward be found new lands, 
That we never heard tell of before this 
By writing nor other means, 
Yet many now have been there; 
And that country is so large of room, 
Much longer than all Christendom, 
Without fable or guile; 
For divers mariners had it tried, 
And sailed straight by the coast side 
Above five thousand mile! 
But what commodities be within, 
No man can tell nor well imagine; 
Oh, what a thing had be then, 
If that they that be Englishmen 
Might have been the first of all 
That there should have take possession, 
And made first building and habitation, 
A memory perpetual! (25) 
For a play so frankly pedagogic in content and purpose the 
author thought best to give some justification. Accordingly, the 

