110 



THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



Oil of Lemons, Oil of Bergamoth, from the juioe of the limo ; 

 Oil of Cloves, Oil of Ginger, and Oil of Thyme. 



Attar of Roses consists of two compounds, a liquid and a 

 solid ; the liquid is the fragrant portion. 



Camphor (0 10 H la O) differs from the above group in contain- 

 ing oxygen, and seeing that it is the element of turpentine, 

 with an atom of oxygen, it is not to be wondered that many 

 plants yield it by the oxidisation of their essential oils. The 

 ordinary camphor of the shops is procured from the Laurus 

 camphora ; the wood of the tree is placed with water in a still, 

 the head of which is full of rice straw ; on this the camphor 

 condenses. After several sublimations, it is ready for the 

 market ; when thrown on water it swims and dissolves, with a 

 peculiar gyratory motion, which is instantly checked by a drop 

 of essential oil upon the surface of the water. 



Camphor volatilises at low temperature, and if it be covered 

 by a glass shade the vapour condenses in octahedral crystals on 

 the glass, a fact frequently illustrated in a chemist's window. 



Camphor ignites and burns with a bright flame ; a coil of 

 red-hot platinum wire held over a piece of camphor continues to 

 be red-hot, owing to the continued slow combustion of the 

 camphor vapour on the surface of the wire. 



Borneo Camphor contains 2 atoms of hydrogen more than the 

 ordinary variety, but when treated with nitric acid these it gives 

 up, and assumes the composition and properties of ordinary 

 camphor. 



The Essence of Bitter Almonds. This well-known flavouring 

 principle is derived from bitter almonds, the kernels of the 

 peach, plum, cherry, etc., and the leaves of the laurel. Those 

 kernels are first pressed to free them from fixed oils, then 

 ground and mixed with water, and distilled BO long as the dis- 

 tillate comes over milky. This essence, or Benzoil Hydride, is 

 not itself poisonous, but, unless especially purified, it contains 

 prussic acid. 



Benzoic Acid (H,C,H 5 O 2 ) is artificially prepared from bitter 

 almonds, but its chief source is the Styrax benzoin, a shrub 

 which grows in the Asiatic Archipelago, and yields benzoin. 



Of late years it has been largely prepared from naphthaline ; 

 it is a light glistening mass of silky needles ; its vapour gives 

 the well-known scent of incense. Its compounds and deriva- 

 tives are very numerous. 



Allyle Sulphide, (C 3 H 5 ) 2 S. This compound gives the strong 

 distinctive odour to the essential oils of garlic, onions, leeks, 

 radishes, and assafoetida. The pungency of the horse-radish is 

 duo to the allyle sulphocyanide (C 3 H 5 ,CNS), which is the prin- 

 cipal ingredient in the oil of mustard. 



The only remaining vegetable products of this class are 

 resins; these are procured from certain trees by making 

 incisions into their wood ; they are usually produced by the 

 oxidation of the essential oils ; in some cases the resin is in 

 solution in the oil. 



Lac is the most valuable of the resins ; it is the produce of 

 certain trees. Resins are used for varnishes and numerous other 

 art processes. 



Caoutchouc, or Indian-rubier, is a substance suspended in the 

 juice of some tropical plants. When it exudes from the tree 

 it is yellow ; when exposed to the air in thin layers, the liquid 

 evaporates, leaving the caoutchouc mixed with albumen as a 

 flexible brown film. It is dissolved by chloroform, carbonic 

 disulphide, coal naphtha, rectified oil of turpentine. Its many 

 uses are well known : in applying it to cloth in the manufacture 

 of waterproof, it is used dissolved in one of the above solvents. 



LESSONS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. X. 



THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD THE DRAMA. 

 THE great glory of the Elizabethan period is its drama.. But 

 in order to realise the development of the drama during this 

 age, it is necessary to know something of what it had been 

 before. 



The earliest plays in England, as throughout Europe gene- 

 rally, were essentially religious in character, and intended to 

 convey religious truths in the most striking manner to an 

 illiterate people. They were for the most part written by 

 churchmen, and acted by the clergy in the larger churches. 

 Some of these plays, which were no doubt acted upon some of 

 the great festivals of the Church, represented in a dramatic 



form the principal events of the Bible history, and were in- 

 tended to illustrate and impress upon the popular mind the 

 leading- doctrines of the Christian faith. These plays were, 

 not unnaturally, called Mysteries. Others were founded 

 upon the legends of the saints, and represented the wonders 

 of their lives and deaths. These were probably acted upon the 

 festivals of the saints whose deeds and sufferings they de- 

 picted, and were with some appropriateness called Miracles 

 or Miracle Plays. Such were the dramatic entertainments of 

 all Christian Europe during the Middle Ages ; and the " Pas- 

 sion" play, which is still acted every tenth year at Ammergau, 

 in the Tyrol, and which draws the Tyrolese peasants together 

 in thousands to gaze in devout wonder at a dramatic repre- 

 sentation of the life and death of Christ, is exactly the mystery 

 of the Middle Ages, which has survived in that remote corner, 

 of Europe centuries after it has been forgotten elsewhere. 



It is probable that such plays were introduced into England 

 from France soon after the Norman Conquest. The earliest 

 of them were in Latin ; perhaps then for a time in England 

 in French. But in this, as in other departments, the English 

 tongue overcame its competitors, and became the established 

 language of the religious drama. 



In course of time a variety was introduced into these re- 

 ligious plays. In the mysteries and miracles, as we have seen, 

 the characters were real personages, and the incidents were 

 historical or what were supposed to be historical facts. The 

 Morals or Moralities, which came into vogue at a later date, 

 were allegorical, not historical. Instead of the virtuous 

 and vicious personages of sacred history, they had as their 

 characters the various virtues and vices themselves, and other 

 abstract conceptions, brought upon the stage, together with 

 personifications of mankind in general, or other representatives 

 of ordinary humanity, which are shown as acted upon by the 

 various passions or principles represented by the allegorical 

 personages. One of the most important characters in all these 

 plays was the vice, probably the lineal ancestor of the modern 

 clown. He was a kind of buffoon, and to him, together with 

 the devil who had performed the same function in the older 

 mysteries, and who was still retained in the moralities was 

 entrusted most of the comic element in such pieces. 



We have already said that, in the earliest times, the mys- 

 teries and miracle plays were not only religious in subject, but 

 religious in purpose too, being acted by clerical persons in 

 sacred places with a view to instruction, and on the occasion of 

 religious solemnities. Thus, of the most important sets of 

 mysteries which have come down to us, one set was acted 

 annually on Corpus Christi day by the Grey friars at Coventry, 

 Another set was acted, it is supposed, at the abbey of Widkirk. 

 But in course of time, though the subjects of the plays re- 

 mained the same, the whole spirit of the performance became 

 changed. What had once been a religious ceremonial became 

 a mere popular entertainment. One marked step in this pro- 

 cess was made when these plays came to be acted by others 

 than the clergy, or those connected with the clergy, and in 

 other than sacred places. Thus a third important set of old 

 mysteries which have come down to our times were acted yearly 

 in Whitsun week by the trades of Chester, each of the twenty- 

 five separate plays of which the set consists being assigned to 

 a particular trade, by the members of which it was acted from 

 year to year. These plays, too, were not performed in any 

 sacred place, but upon movable stages at various points in 

 the streets of Chester ; the plan being that, as each play was 

 finished in one street, stage and all was moved away to another 

 street, making room for the play next in order, so that all the 

 plays were going on at once, and each in its turn made the 

 circuit of the town. Nor was it only in the case of such great 

 popular exhibitions as these that the performance of the mys- 

 teries was losing its religious character. They came to be 

 acted at court festivities and on other similar occasions purely 

 secular. The moralities, too, in which abstract virtues and 

 vices took the place of the most sacred real characters, evi- 

 dently appealed far less to religious associations than the older 

 form of play had done, and so tended to secularise the stage. 



Up to a very early period the existence of mysteries and 

 miracle plays in England may be traced, and before very long 

 the distinction between the two terms came to be neglected, 

 and they were used almost indiscriminately. In a later period, 

 allusions to such plays .are common in Piers Ploughman and 





