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 relieve the somewhat obtrusive realism of the broader comic parts, this masque has other claims on our notice and remembrance; the ingenuity and dexterity, the richness of resource and the pliability of humour, which inform and animate all its lyric prophecies or compliments.

The masque which appeared in the following year is a monument of learning and labour such as no other poet could have dreamed of lavishing on a ceremonial or official piece of work, and which can only be appreciated by careful reading and thorough study of the copious notes and references appended to the text. But the writer's fancy was at a low ebb when it could devise nothing better than is to be found in this Masque of Augurs: the humour is coarse and clumsy, the verses arc flat and stiff. In the next year's Twelfth-Night masque, Time vindicated to himself and to his honours, the vigorous and vicious personalities of the attack on George Wither give some life to the part in which the author of Abuses Stript and Whipt is brought in under the name of Chronomastix to make mirth for the groundlings of the Court. The feeble and facile fluency of his pedestrian Muse in the least fortunate hours of her