CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 19 



And the people too ; from our old primitive folk to modern 

 Bengal, and to Calcutta, with its poets, artists, thinkers ! 

 Why cannot this be done ? It should be ! It must be ! 

 Then and then only shall we fully realise the true India, 

 where all peoples with their traditions became unified by 

 the spirit of their land, and where even elements seemingly 

 discordant may yield factors of individuality and strength. 

 It is these which have kept India rejuvenescent and 

 ever evolving ; and which will save her from that palsy 

 of death which has extinguished so many of her ancient 

 contemporaries ! ' 



To all this the writer cannot but warmly agree ; since 

 for him, among all the many advances of education, amid 

 which he has worked experimentally throughout life, there 

 is none in his experience which has more fully justified its 

 value than does dramatisation ; and this from the earliest 

 childish make-believe and its small home scenes, and through 

 village and family plays, up to the largest culture- 

 pageanting which University has yet made for City. So 

 let him recall from one of these Masques its scene of highest 

 dramatic and literary commemoration for the English 

 tongue that of the Mermaid Tavern, with Ben Jonson in 

 its chair, and Shakespeare making his farewell to him and 

 all his old companions. Among them high place was 

 given to three whose names are seldom remembered, 

 yet who were none the less the virtual professoriate of that 

 illustrious group of dramatists and poets. For one was the 

 chronicler who gave Shakespeare his plot for ' Macbeth/ and 

 for his English historical plays ; another the translator of 

 Plutarch's ' Lives ' of the great Greeks and Romans, without 

 which we should lack Mark Antony, and more ; and the 

 third was the translator of Montaigne, whose kindly wisdom 

 suffused Shakespeare's thought, and kindled Bacon to his 

 scarcely less immortal Essays. Such a scene is thus no 

 mere past revival, but an affirmation too, of a long-lost 

 yet now returning secret that of the permeation of the 

 Theatre with the great heritage of the university. For by 



