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HE idea has no doubt often been held which the talented dogmatist LeBon voiced in the assertion that most social phenomena are expressible by nearly similar and presumably simple geometrical curves.I The rise and fall of national arts and of national fortunes certainly seem to bear out such a conception, even though definite proof has apparently never been attempted. Historians frequently allude to the development and degeneration of a state, or of some aspect of its civilization, as if such symmetrical growths and declines were familiar and normally recurring events; but they beware rather consistently from formulating the assumption into a principle, or proclaiming it as an abstract and accurate law.If one considers the story of the Elizabethan drama from its stiffly archaic inceptions through the awakening in Greene and Marlowe, the Shaksperian glory, the slackening to the level of Fletcher, Webster, Ford, and Massinger, to the close of the playhouses by the civil war, the picture of an even-sided'curve rises in the mind. The masterpieces of the greatest member of the school fall in the first decade of the seventeenth century. His more prolix and less intense tragedies and comedies, and the plays of contemporaries nearest him in achievement, precede and follow by a few years. Each quinquennium more distant from the culmination is marked by greater crudity in recession, more extended laxity in progression of time; and the total duration before and after the acme is substantially equal

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