They were a people of violent contrasts, of sudden and unpremeditated changes, who welcomed paradox with open arms and accepted the contradiction of life on its own terms. Sir Walter Raleigh could violate his own word, giving a whole town to slaughter, and yet celebrate the power of death in a peroration of romantic fervor. Marston was a satirist of brutal and unscrupulous force, who saw the inside of a London jail before retiring to the ruminative dullness of a provincial pastorage. The dramatist who celebrated a ruinous love in Egypt could see only fraud and treachery in the heroes of the Iliad. And the Virgin Queen herself, in the midst of devious intriguing with a half-hostile, half amorous Europe, while cursing her courtiers and badgering her maids-in-waiting, could turn her hand to lyrics of evanescent charm.

The Vagabond, retreating from the snow flurries to the airy warmth of his tower, meditates by preference on those not-so-spacious but still glamorous days when Leicester's barge moved down the Thames in the evening, when a bribed servant brought a certain ring to Elizabeth on the morning of Essex's execution. On winter nights, with a sheet of snow on the streets, and the wind making the torches flare, a group of roisterers would come back from an afternoon at the Globe, or bear-baiting on the Bank side, or even from an excursion among the wenches who haunted Cheapside. Past the bridge, with its houses jutting over the water, and the traitors' heads stuck up on poles, they hurry on to one of the inns, a warm fire, dinner, and the canary flowing. A huge hound or two yawns about the table for food or crunches a bone on the hearth. Talk is free and boisterous until the fire burns low. Then a young boy, a page or a wandering minstrel, with a lute suspended from a silver cord around his neck, comes in with a repertory of ballads and lyrics, and sings for them--Campion's latest stanzas, perhaps, or some slight verses of his own. The crude excitements of the times vanish in the music, and the dogs curl up their paws by the flames.

Professor Hallyer will talk about the lyrics of the Elizabethans in Sever 11, at 10 o'clock this morning.

TODAY

9 O'Clock

"Macauly," Professor Rollins, Emerson F.

"Nationalism and Progress." Professor Brinton, Harvard 5.

10 O'Clock

"The Elizabethan Lyric," Associate Professor Billyer, Sever 11.

"Poe," Professor Murdock, Harvard 6.

"Intellectual Development of Russia in the eighteenth century," Mr. Karpovitch, Boylston 21.

11 O'Clock

"Eighteenth Century Drama Germany," Professor Murray, Harvard 6.

"Milton," Professor Munn, Sever 11.

"Vanbrugh," Professor Sprague, Harvard 3.