Excerpt from Romantic Biography of the Age of Elizabeth, or Sketches of Life From the Bye-Ways of History, Vol. 1 of 2 His career was then abruptly terminated by a sudden descent through a trap-door into regions unknown, whence he was rescued bruised, bat tered, and confounded, by some mysterious agency, and led to his place upon the stage. This was rather a bad preparation for witnessing what is not very tolerable at any time, an undress rehearsal, and accordingly be abused every person and thing connected with the piece. The drama was founded on some adventures of the Olympic deities; according to his account, Venus was a monster of ugliness; Minerva, a downright idiot; Mars, afraid of his shadow; Apollo, the most wretched of fiddlers; and Cupid, a baby-girl; the only well-supported characters were Mercury and Bacchus, the former of whom was detected pick ing pockets, and the latter was, of course, glori ously drunk. I thought then, what I think now, that if we could gain admission behind the scenes in the drama of life, we might discover similar defects in many of the actors on whom the world has been accustomed to bestow indiscriminate approbation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.