But our estimate of John Marston's rank or regiment in the noble army of contemporary poets will not be in any way affected by acceptance or rejection of any apocryphal addition to the canon of his writings. For better and for worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them will suffice to decide that question beyond all chance of intelligent or rational dispute. His rank is high in his own regiment; and the colonel of that regiment is Ben Jonson. At first sight he may seem rather to belong to that brighter and more famous one which has Webster among its captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Heywood among its privates, and Shakespeare at its head. Nor did he by any means follow the banner of Jonson with such automatic fidelity as that imperious martinet of genius was wont to exact from those who came to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben." A rigid critic—a critic who should push rigidity to the verge of injustice—might say that he was one of those recruits in literature whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools—to halt between two courses. It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson. But it is no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that line except "Sejanus his Fall" and "Catiline his Conspiracy." It is superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an achievement only less far out of his reach than "Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that he does not deserve an honorable place among English poets. His savage and unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more potent and more truculent satirist:

An honest man he is, and hates the slime That sticks on filthy deeds.

We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust, not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of affectation or of self-indulgence. His real interest and his real sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in "Parasitaster" and "The Dutch Courtesan," a general defect in his unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the work of a professional and practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and slovenly are not the same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence. I have already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather, we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the pefunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the time employed. Now and then, however—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say once or twice—a gayer note is struck with a lighter touch than usual: as, for instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put into the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the fifth act of the first part of "Antonio and Mellida." "You know, the stone called lapis, the nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and the bird which the geometricians call avis, the farther it is from the earth, the nearer it is to the heaven; and love, the nigher it is to the flame, the more remote (there's a word, remote!)—the more remote it is from the frost." Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly established. His intermittent power to rid himself for a while of his besetting faults, and to acquire or assume for a moment the very excellences most incompatible with these, is as extraordinary for the completeness as for the transience of its successful effects. The brief fourth act of "Antonio and Mellida" is the most astonishing and bewildering production of belated human genius that ever distracted or discomfited a student. Verses more delicately beautiful followed by verses more simply majestic than these have rarely if ever given assurance of eternity to the fame of any but a great master in song:

Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, My hand retains a little breath of sweet, So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away, Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest. 'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out, And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, The soul itself gallops along with them As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste Until the soul return.

Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author's usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil and for good, could be found in the works of any other writer.

The Muse of this poet is no maiden of such pure and august beauty as enthralls us with admiration of Webster's; she has not the gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glances and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere. No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of her sisterhood.



THOMAS MIDDLETON

If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes of literature. The sun is strong and the wind sharp in the climate which reared the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The extreme inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account when we are disposed, as I for one have often been disposed, to wonder beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the nineteenth century, it cannot but seem strange that comparatively so few should have availed themselves of the entry to so rich and royal an estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. Dyce made the rough ways plain and the devious paths straight for all serious and worthy students. And now again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task than which none more arduous and important, none worthier of thanks and praise, can be undertaken by an English scholar. In his beautiful and valuable edition of Marlowe there are but two points to which exception may be taken. It was, I think, a fault of omission to exclude the apocryphal play of "Lust's Dominion" from a place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a fault of commission to admit instead of it the much bepuffed and very puffy rubbish of the late Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic writer never went so far out of his depth or floundered so pitifully in such perilous waters as when he ventured to put verses of his own into the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors we must all hope to see rectified in a second issue of the text: and meantime we can but welcome with all possible gratitude and applause the magnificent series of old plays by unknown writers which we owe to the keen research and the fine appreciation of Marlowe's latest editor. Of these I may find some future occasion to speak: my present business is with the admirable poet who has been promoted to the second place in Mr. Bullen's collection of the English dramatists.

The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic literature. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised the editor "to begin with the collected plays of Heywood": which as yet, like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious or scholarly sense of the term. The existing reprints merely reproduce, without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text of the worst early editions: while Middleton has for upward of half a century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accounted his equals if not his superiors in poetic if not in dramatic genius. Even for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest ability there is comparatively little to do where Mr. Dyce has been before him in the field. However, we must all give glad and grateful welcome to a new edition of a noble poet who has never yet received his full meed of praise and justice: though our gratitude and our gladness may be quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense of further favors to come.

The first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton was not spoken by Charles Lamb. Four years before the appearance of the priceless volume which established his fame forever among all true lovers of English poetry by copious excerpts from five of his most characteristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the fifty-sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical romance of "Sir Tristrem," had given a passing word of recognition to the "horribly striking" power of "some passages" in Middleton's masterpiece: which was first reprinted eleven years later, in the fourth volume of Dilke's Old Plays. Lamb, surprisingly enough, has given not a single extract from that noble tragedy: it was reserved for Leigh Hunt, when speaking of its author, to remark that "there is one character of his (De Flores in 'The Changeling') which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life." The praise is not a whit too high; the truth could not have been better said.

The play with which Mr. Bullen, altering the arrangement adopted by Mr. Dyce, opens his edition of Middleton, is a notable example of the best and the worst qualities which distinguish or disfigure the romantic comedy of the Shakespearean age. The rude and reckless composition, the rough intrusion of savorless farce, the bewildering combinations of incident and the far more bewildering fluctuations of character—all the inconsistencies, incongruities, incoherences of the piece are forgotten when the reader remembers and reverts to the passages of exquisite and fascinating beauty which relieve and redeem the utmost errors of negligence and haste. To find anything more delightful, more satisfying in its pure and simple perfection of loveliness, we must turn to the very best examples of Shakespeare's youthful work. Nay, it must be allowed that in one or two of the master's earliest plays—in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," for instance—we shall find nothing comparable for charm and sincerity of sweet and passionate fancy with such enchanting verses as these:

O happy persecution, I embrace thee With an unfettered soul! So sweet a thing It is to sigh upon the rack of love, Where each calamity is groaning witness Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose. Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell.

Again: the "secure tyrant, but unhappy lover," whose prisoner and rival has thus expressed his triumphant resignation, is counselled by his friend to "go laugh and lie down," as not having slept for three nights; but answers, in words even more delicious than his supplanter's:

Alas, how can I? he that truly loves Burns out the day in idle fantasies; And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night Unto the closing day, then tears begin To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice Shrieks like the bellman in the lover's ears: Love's eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears! The early lark is wakened from her bed, Being only by love's plaints disquieted; And, singing in the morning's ear, she weeps, Being deep in love, at lovers' broken sleeps: But say a golden slumber chance to tie With silken strings the cover of love's eye, Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.

Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two in the play which follows. "The Phoenix" is a quaint and homely compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid and "Albert the Good," who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy—a province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i. scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii. scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above quoted. Milton's obligation to the latter passage is less direct than his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton's from which he transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in "Lycidas": but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think[1]) left in the ear of the blind old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of the dramatist's address to "reverend and honorable matrimony."

[Footnote 1: Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun Society that the real author of "A Game at Chess" was none other than John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before the publication of that anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the same authority, that "Comus" was written by Sir John Suckling, "Paradise Regained" by Lord Rochester, and "Samson Agonistes" by Elkanah Settle: while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that Milton—who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him—owed his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact that he was the real author of Dryden's "Astraea Redux."]

In "Michaelmas Term" the realism of Middleton's comic style is no longer alloyed or flavored with poetry or fancy. It is an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humor. Its successor, "A Trick to Catch the Old One," is by far the best play Middleton had yet written, and one of the best he ever wrote. The merit of this and his other good comedies does not indeed consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean creation or Jonsonian invention of humors or of men: the spendthrifts and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed from the common stock of stage tradition: it is the vivid variety of incident and intrigue, the freshness and ease and vigor of the style, the clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the action, that the reader finds most praiseworthy in the best comic work of such ready writers as Middleton and Dekker. The dialogue has sometimes touches of real humor and flashes of genuine wit: but its readable and enjoyable quality is generally independent of these. Very witty writing may be very dreary reading, for want of natural animation and true dramatic movement: and in these qualities at least the rough-and-ready work of our old dramatists is seldom if ever deficient.

It is, however, but too probable that the reader's enjoyment may be crossed with a dash of exasperation when he finds a writer of real genius so reckless of fame and self-respect as the pressure of want or the weariness of overwork seems but too often and too naturally to have made too many of the great dramatic journeymen whose powers were half wasted or half worn out in the struggle for bare bread. No other excuse than this can be advanced for the demerit of Middleton's next comedy. Had the author wished to show how well and how ill he could write at his worst and at his best, he could have given no fairer proof than by the publication of two plays issued under his name in the same year 1608. "The Family of Love" is, in my judgment, unquestionably and incomparably the worst of Middleton's plays: very coarse, very dull, altogether distasteful and ineffectual. As a religious satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no impression of any definite folly or distinctive knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up by name to ridicule: an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, concerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent and inoffensive in comparison with the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous and senseless license of our own day allows to run and roar about the country unmuzzled and unwhipped.

There is much more merit in the broad comedy of "Your Five Gallants," a curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable for imitation. The ingenious and humorous invention which supplies a centre for the picture and a pivot for the action is most singularly identical with the device of a modern detective as recorded by the greatest English writer of his day. "The Butcher's Story," told to Dickens by the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective humor with the story of Fitsgrave—a "thrice worthy" gentleman who under the disguise of a young gull fresh from college succeeds in circumventing and unmasking the five associated swindlers of variously villanous professions by whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered and befooled. The play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous event.

The first of Middleton's plays to attract notice from students of a later generation, "A Mad World, My Masters," if not quite so thoroughly good a comedy as "A Trick to Catch the Old One," must be allowed to contain the very best comic character ever drawn or sketched by the fertile and flowing pen of its author. The prodigal grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress, is perhaps the most life-like figure of a good-humored and liberal old libertine that ever amused or scandalized a tolerant or intolerant reader. The chief incidents of the action are admirably humorous and ingenious; but the matrimonial part of the catastrophe is something more than repulsive, and the singular intervention of a real live succubus, less terrible in her seductions than her sister of the "Contes Drolatiques," can hardly seem happy or seasonable to a generation which knows not King James and his Demonology.

Of the two poets occasionally associated with Middleton in the composition of a play, Dekker seems usually to have taken in hand the greater part, and Rowley the lesser part, of the composite poem engendered by their joint efforts. The style of "The Roaring Girl" is full of Dekker's peculiar mannerisms; slipshod and straggling metre, incongruous touches or flashes of fanciful or lyrical expression, reckless and awkward inversions, irrational and irrepressible outbreaks of irregular and fitful rhyme. And with all these faults it is more unmistakably the style of a born poet than is the usual style of Middleton. Dekker would have taken a high place among the finest if not among the greatest of English poets if he had but had the sense of form—the instinct of composition. Whether it was modesty, indolence, indifference, or incompetence, some drawback or shortcoming there was which so far impaired the quality of his strong and delicate genius that it is impossible for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say or think of his very best work that it really does him justice—that it adequately represents the fulness of his unquestionable powers. And yet it is certain that Lamb was not less right than usual when he said that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything." But he had not constructive power enough for the trade of a playwright—the trade in which he spent so many weary years of ill-requited labor. This comedy in which we first find him associated with Middleton is well written and well contrived, and fairly diverting—especially to an idle or an uncritical reader: though even such an one may suspect that the heroine here represented as a virginal virago must have been in fact rather like Dr. Johnson's fair friend Bet Flint; of whom the Great Lexicographer "used to say that she was generally slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief" (Boswell, May 8, 1781). The parallel would have been more nearly complete if Moll Cutpurse "had written her own Life in verse," and brought it to Selden or Bishop Hall with a request that he would furnish her with a preface to it.

The plays of Middleton are not so properly divisible into tragic and comic as into realistic and romantic—into plays of which the mainspring is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical. Two only of the former class remain to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" and "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside." There is very good stuff in the plot or groundwork of the former, but the workmanship is hardly worthy of the material, Mr. Bullen ingeniously and plausibly suggests the partnership of Shirley in this play: but the conception of the character in which he discerns a likeness to the touch of the lesser dramatist is happier and more original than such a comparison would indicate. The young stepmother whose affectation of selfish levity and grasping craft is really designed to cure her husband of his infatuation, and to reconcile him with the son who regards her as his worst enemy, is a figure equally novel, effective, and attractive. The honest shopkeeper and his shrewish wife may remind us again of Dickens by their points of likeness to Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; though the reformation of the mercer's jealous vixen is brought about by more humorous and less tragical means than the repentance of the law-stationer's "little woman." George the apprentice, through whose wit and energy this happy consummation becomes possible, is a very original and amusing example of the young Londoner of the period. But there is more humor, though very little chastity, in the "Chaste Maid"; a play of quite exceptional freedom and audacity, and certainly one of the drollest and liveliest that ever broke the bounds of propriety or shook the sides of merriment.

The opening of "More Dissemblers Besides Women" is as full at once of comic and of romantic promise as the upshot of the whole is unsatisfactory—a most lame and impotent conclusion. But some of the dialogue is exquisite; full of flowing music and gentle grace, of ease and softness and fancy and spirit; and the part of a poetic or romantic Joseph Surface, as perfect in the praise of virtue as in the practice of vice, is one of Middleton's really fine and happy inventions. In the style of "The Widow" there is no less fluency and facility: it is throughout identical with that of Middleton's other comedies in metre; a style which has so many points in common with Fletcher's as to make the apocryphal attribution of a share in this comedy to the hand of the greater poet more plausible than many other ascriptions of the kind. I am inclined nevertheless to agree with Mr. Bullen's apparent opinion that the whole credit of this brilliant play may be reasonably assigned to Middleton; and especially with his remark that the only scene in which any resemblance to the manner of Ben Jonson can be traced by the most determined ingenuity of critical research is more like the work of a pupil than like a hasty sketch of the master's. There is no lack of energetic invention and beautiful versification in another comedy of adventure and intrigue, "No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's": the unpleasant or extravagant quality of certain incidents in the story is partially neutralized or modified by the unfailing charm of a style worthy of Fletcher himself in his ripest and sweetest stage of poetic comedy.

But high above all the works yet mentioned there stands and will stand conspicuous while noble emotion and noble verse have honor among English readers the pathetic and heroic play so memorably appreciated by Charles Lamb, "A Fair Quarrel." It would be the vainest and emptiest impertinence to offer a word in echo of his priceless and imperishable praise. The delicate nobility of the central conception on which the hero's character depends for its full relief and development should be enough to efface all remembrance of any defect or default in moral taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of ethics, which may be detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet's invention. A man must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who cannot respond in spirit to that bitter cry of chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the shadow of a mother's shame:

Quench, my spirit, And out with honor's naming lights within thee! Be dark and dead to all respects of manhood! I never shall have use of valor more.

Middleton has no second hero like Captain Ager: but where is there another so thoroughly noble and lovable among all the characters of all the dramatists of his time but Shakespeare?

The part taken by Rowley in this play is easy for any tiro in criticism to verify. The rough and crude genius of that perverse and powerful writer is not seen here by any means at its best. I should say that his call was rather toward tragedy than toward comedy; that his mastery of severe and serious emotion was more genuine and more natural than his command of satirical or grotesque realism. The tragedy in which he has grappled with the subject afterward so differently handled in the first and greatest of Landor's tragedies is to me of far more interest and value than such comedies as that which kindled the enthusiasm of a loyal Londoner in the civic sympathies of Lamb. Disfigured as it is toward the close by indulgence in mere horror and brutality after the fashion of Andronicus or Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and pathos in its best scenes than a reader of his comedies would have expected. But in the underplot of "A Fair Quarrel" Rowley's besetting faults of coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet of finer if not of sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better parts of "The Old Law." The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical interludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and hastiest scenes of Middleton's writing: while the sweet and noble dignity of the finer passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on every line and in every cadence. But for sheer bewildering incongruity there is no play known to me which can be compared with "The Mayor of Queenborough." Here again we find a note so dissonant and discordant in the lighter parts of the dramatic concert that we seem at once to recognize the harsher and hoarser instrument of Rowley. The farce is even more extravagantly and preposterously mistimed and misplaced than that which disfigures the play just mentioned: but I thoroughly agree with Mr. Bullen's high estimate of the power displayed and maintained throughout the tragic and poetic part of this drama; to which no previous critic has ever vouchsafed a word of due acknowledgment. The story is ugly and unnatural, but its repulsive effect is transfigured or neutralized by the charm of tender or passionate poetry; and it must be admitted that the hideous villany of Vortiger and Horsus affords an opening for subsequent scenic effects of striking and genuine tragical interest.

The difference between the genius of Middleton and the genius of Dekker could not be better illustrated than by comparison of their attempts at political and patriotic allegory. The lazy, slovenly, impatient genius of Dekker flashes out by fits and starts on the reader of the play in which he has expressed his English hatred of Spain and Popery, his English pride in the rout of the Armada, and his English gratitude for the part played by Queen Elizabeth in the crowning struggle of the time: but his most cordial admirer can hardly consider "The Whore of Babylon" a shining or satisfactory example of dramatic art. The play which brought Middleton into prison, and earned for the actors a sum so far beyond parallel as to have seemed incredible till the fullest evidence was procured, is one of the most complete and exquisite works of artistic ingenuity and dexterity that ever excited or offended, enraptured or scandalized an audience of friends or enemies: the only work of English poetry which may properly be called Aristophanic. It has the same depth of civic seriousness, the same earnest ardor and devotion to the old cause of the old country, the same solid fervor of enthusiasm and indignation, which animated the third great poet of Athens against the corruption of art by the sophistry of Euripides and the corruption of manhood by the sophistry of Socrates. The delicate skill of the workmanship can only be appreciated by careful and thorough study; but that the infusion of poetic fancy and feeling into the generally comic and satiric style is hardly unworthy of the comparison which I have ventured to challenge, I will take but one brief extract for evidence:

Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth, The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn Upon a bashful rose.

Here for once even "that celestial thief" John Milton has impaired rather than improved the effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed from an earlier and inferior poet. His use of Middleton's exquisite image is not quite so apt—so perfectly picturesque and harmonious—as the use to which it was put by the inventor.

Nothing in the age of Shakespeare is so difficult for an Englishman of our own age to realize as the temper, the intelligence, the serious and refined elevation of an audience which was at once capable of enjoying and applauding the roughest and coarsest kinds of pleasantly, the rudest and crudest scenes of violence, and competent to appreciate the finest and the highest reaches of poetry, the subtlest and the most sustained allusions of ethical or political symbolism. The large and long popularity of an exquisite dramatic or academic allegory such as "Lingua," which would seem to appeal only to readers of exceptional education, exceptional delicacy of perception, and exceptional quickness of wit, is hardly more remarkable than the popular success of a play requiring such keen constancy of attention, such vivid wakefulness and promptitude of apprehension, as this even more serious than fantastic work of Middleton's. The vulgarity and puerility of all modern attempts at any comparable effect need not be cited to throw into relief the essential finish, the impassioned intelligence, the high spiritual and literary level, of these crowded and brilliant and vehement five acts. Their extreme cleverness, their indefatigable ingenuity, would in any case have been remarkable: but their fulness of active and poetic life gives them an interest far deeper and higher and more permanent than the mere sense of curiosity and wonder.

But if "A Game at Chess" is especially distinguished by its complete and thorough harmony of execution and design, the lack of any such artistic merit in another famous work of Middleton's is such as once more to excite that irritating sense of inequality, irregularity, inconstancy of genius and inconsequence of aim, which too often besets and bewilders the student of our early dramatists. There is poetry enough in "The Witch" to furnish forth a whole generation of poeticules: but the construction or composition of the play, the arrangement and evolution of event, the distinction or development of character, would do less than little credit to a boy of twelve; who at any rate would hardly have thought of patching up so ridiculous a reconciliation between intending murderers and intended victims as here exceeds in absurdity the chaotic combination of accident and error which disposes of inconvenient or superfluous underlings. But though neither Mr. Dyce nor Mr. Bullen has been at all excessive or unjust in his animadversions on these flagrant faults and follies, neither editor has given his author due credit for the excellence of style, of language and versification, which makes this play readable throughout with pleasure, if not always without impatience. Fletcher himself, the acknowledged master of the style here adopted by Middleton, has left no finer example of metrical fluency and melodious ease. The fashion of dialogue and composition is no doubt rather feminine than masculine: Marlowe and Jonson, Webster and Beaumont, Tourneur and Ford—to cite none but the greatest of authorities in this kind—wrote a firmer if not a freer hand, struck a graver if not a sweeter note of verse: this rapid effluence of easy expression is liable to lapse into conventional efflux of facile improvisation: but such command of it as Middleton's is impossible to any but a genuine and a memorable poet.

As for the supposed obligations of Shakespeare to Middleton or Middleton to Shakespeare, the imaginary relations of "The Witch" to "Macbeth" or "Macbeth" to "The Witch," I can only say that the investigation of this subject seems to me as profitable as a research into the natural history of snakes in Iceland. That the editors to whom we owe the miserably defaced and villanously garbled text which is all that has reached us of "Macbeth," not content with the mutilation of the greater poet, had recourse to the interpolation of a few superfluous and incongruous lines or fragments from the lyric portions of the lesser poet's work—that the players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers who plundered Middleton—must be obvious to all but those (if any such yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing the unspeakably impudent assertion of those mendacious malefactors that they have left us a pure and perfect edition of Shakespeare. These passages are all thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of the lesser work: it would be tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping with the general tone of the other. But in their own way nothing can be finer: they have a tragic liveliness in ghastliness, a grotesque animation of horror, which no other poet has ever conceived or conveyed to us. The difference between Michael Angelo and Goya, Tintoretto and Gustave Dore, does not quite efface the right of the minor artists to existence and remembrance.

The strange and strangely beautiful tragic poem, which could not have come down to us under a stupider or a less appropriate name than that apparently conferred on it by the licenser of "The Second Maiden's Tragedy," must by all evidence of internal and external probability be almost unquestionably assigned to the hand of Middleton. The masterly daring of the stage effect, which cannot or should not be mistaken for the merely theatrical audacity of a headlong impressionist at any price, is not more characteristic of the author than the tender and passionate fluency of the flawless verse. The rather eccentric intermittency of the supernatural action is a no less obviously plausible reason for assigning it to the creator of so realistic a witch and so singular a succubus. But such a dramatic poem as this would be a conspicuous jewel in the crown of any but a supremely great dramatist and poet. And the musical or metrical harmony of the verse, imperceptible as it may be or rather must always be to the long-eared dunces who can only think to hear through their clumsy fingers, is so like Fletcher's as to suggest that if any part of Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII." is attributable to a lesser hand than his it may far more plausibly be assigned to Middleton's than to Fletcher's. Had it or could it have been the work of Fletcher, the clamorous and multitudinous satellites who preferred him with such furious fatuity of acclamation to so inconsiderable a rival as Shakespeare would hardly have abstained from reclaiming it on behalf of the great poet whom it pleased their imbecility to set so far above one so immeasurably and so unutterably greater.

The tragedy of "Women Beware Women," whether or not it be accepted as the masterpiece of Middleton, is at least an excellent example of the facility and fluency and equable promptitude of style which all students will duly appreciate and applaud in the riper and completer work of this admirable poet. It is full to overflowing of noble eloquence, of inventive resource and suggestive effect, of rhetorical affluence and theatrical ability. The opening or exposition of the play is quite masterly: and the scene in which the forsaken husband is seduced into consolation by the temptress of his wife is worthy of all praise for the straightforward ingenuity and the serious delicacy by which the action is rendered credible and the situation endurable. But I fear that few or none will be found to disagree with my opinion that no such approbation or tolerance can be reasonably extended so as to cover or condone the offences of either the underplot or the upshot of the play. The one is repulsive beyond redemption by elegance of style, the other is preposterous beyond extenuation on the score of logical or poetical justice. Those who object on principle to solution by massacre must object in consistency to the conclusions of "Hamlet" and "King Lear"; nor are the results of Webster's tragic invention more questionable or less inevitable than the results of Shakespeare's: but the dragnet of murder which gathers in the characters at the close of this play is as promiscuous in its sweep as that cast by Cyril Tourneur over the internecine shoal of sharks who are hauled in and ripped open at the close of "The Revenger's Tragedy." Had Middleton been content with the admirable subject of his main action, he might have given us a simple and unimpeachable masterpiece: and even as it is he has left us a noble and memorable work. It is true that the irredeemable infamy of the leading characters degrades and deforms the nature of the interest excited: the good and gentle old mother whose affectionate simplicity is so gracefully and attractively painted passes out of the story and drops out of the list of actors just when some redeeming figure is most needed to assuage the dreariness of disgust with which we follow the fortunes of so meanly criminal a crew: and the splendid eloquence of the only other respectable person in the play is not of itself sufficient to make a living figure, rather than the mere mouthpiece for indignant emotion, of so subordinate and inactive a character as the Cardinal. The lower comedy of the play is identical in motive with that which defaces the master-work of Ford: more stupid and offensive it hardly could be. But the high comedy of the scene between Livia and the Widow is as fine as the best work in that kind left us by the best poets and humorists of the Shakespearean age; it is not indeed unworthy of the comparison with Chaucer's which it suggested to the all but impeccable judgment of Charles Lamb.

The lack of moral interest and sympathetic attraction in the characters and the story, which has been noted as the principal defect in the otherwise effective composition of "Women Beware Women," is an objection which cannot be brought against the graceful tragicomedy of "The Spanish Gipsy." Whatever is best in the tragic or in the romantic part of this play bears the stamp of Middleton's genius alike in the sentiment and the style. "The code of modern morals," to borrow a convenient phrase from Shelley, may hardly incline us to accept as plausible or as possible the repentance and the redemption of so brutal a ruffian as Roderigo: but the vivid beauty of the dialogue is equal to the vivid interest of the situation which makes the first act one of the most striking in any play of the time. The double action has some leading points in common with two of Fletcher's, which have nothing in common with each other: Merione in "The Queen of Corinth" is less interesting than Clara, but the vagabonds of "Beggars' Bush" are more amusing than Rowley's or Middleton's. The play is somewhat deficient in firmness or solidity of construction: it is, if such a phrase be permissible, one of those half-baked or underdone dishes of various and confused ingredients, in which the cook's or the baker's hurry has impaired the excellent materials of wholesome bread and savory meat. The splendid slovens who served their audience with spiritual work in which the gods had mixed "so much of earth, so much of heaven, and such impetuous blood"—the generous and headlong purveyors who lavished on their daily provision of dramatic fare such wealth of fine material and such prodigality of superfluous grace—the foremost followers of Marlowe and of Shakespeare were too prone to follow the impetuous example of the first rather than the severe example of the second. There is perhaps not one of them—and Middleton assuredly is not one—whom we can reasonably imagine capable of the patience and self-respect which induced Shakespeare to rewrite the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, of Falstaff, and of Hamlet with an eye to the literary perfection and permanence of work which in its first light outline had won the crowning suffrage of immediate or spectacular applause.

The rough-and-ready hand of Rowley may be traced, not indeed in the more high-toned passages, but in many of the most animated scenes of "The Spanish Gipsy." In the most remarkable of the ten masks or interludes which appear among the collected works of Middleton the two names are again associated. To the freshness, liveliness, and spirited ingenuity of this little allegorical comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in his excellent critical introduction. "The Inner-Temple Masque," less elaborate than "The World Tost at Tennis," shows no lack of homely humor and invention: and in the others there is as much waste of fine flowing verse and facile fancy as ever excited the rational regret of a modern reader at the reckless profusion of literary power which the great poets of the time were content to lavish on the decoration or exposition of an ephemeral pageant. Of Middleton's other minor works, apocryphal or genuine, I will only say that his authorship of "Microcynicon"—a dull and crabbed imitation of Marston's worst work as a satirist—seems to me utterly incredible. A lucid and melodious fluency of style is the mark of all his metrical writing; and this stupid piece of obscure and clumsy jargon could have been the work of no man endowed with more faculty of expression than informs or modulates the whine of an average pig. Nor is it rationally conceivable that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some reams of paper with what he was pleased to consider or to call a paraphrase of the "Wisdom of Solomon" can have had anything but a poet's name in common with a poet. This name is not like that of the great writer whose name is attached to "The Transformed Metamorphosis": there can hardly have been two Cyril Tourneurs in the field, but there may well have been half a dozen Thomas Middletons. And Tourneur's abortive attempt at allegoric discourse is but a preposterous freak of prolonged eccentricity: this paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable sea of limitless and inexhaustible drivel. There are three reasons—two of them considerable, but the third conclusive—for assigning to Middleton the two satirical tracts in the style of Nash, or rather of Dekker, which appeared in the same year with his initials subscribed to their prefatory addresses. Mr. Dyce thought they were written by the poet whose ready verse and realistic humor are both well represented in their text: Mr. Bullen agrees with Mr. Dyce in thinking that they are the work of Middleton. And Mr. Carew Hazlitt thinks that they are not.

No such absolute and final evidence as this can be adduced in favor or disfavor of the theory which would saddle the reputation of Middleton with the authorship of a dull and disjointed comedy, the work (it has hitherto been supposed) of the German substitute for Shakespeare. Middleton has no doubt left us more crude and shapeless plays than "The Puritan"; none, in my opinion—excepting always his very worst authentic example of farce or satire, "The Family of Love"—so heavy and so empty and so feeble. If it must be assigned to any author of higher rank than the new Shakespeare, I would suggest that it is much more like Rowley's than like Middleton's worst work. Of the best qualities which distinguish either of these writers as poet or as humorist, it has not the shadow or the glimmer of a vestige.

In the last and the greatest work which bears their united names—a work which should suffice to make either name immortal if immortality were other than an accidental attribute of genius—the very highest capacity of either poet is seen at its very best. There is more of mere poetry, more splendor of style and vehemence of verbal inspiration, in the work of other poets then writing for the stage: the two masterpieces of Webster are higher in tone at their highest, more imaginative and more fascinating in their expression of terrible or of piteous truth: there are more superb harmonies, more glorious raptures of ardent and eloquent music, in the sometimes unsurpassed and unsurpassable poetic passion of Cyril Tourneur. But even Webster's men seem but splendid sketches, as Tourneur's seem but shadowy or fiery outlines, beside the perfect and living figure of De Flores. The man is so horribly human, so fearfully and wonderfully natural, in his single-hearted brutality of devotion, his absolute absorption of soul and body by one consuming force of passionately cynical desire, that we must go to Shakespeare for an equally original and an equally unquestionable revelation of indubitable truth. And in no play by Beaumont and Fletcher is the concord between the two partners more singularly complete in unity of spirit and of style than throughout the tragic part of this play. The underplot from which it most unluckily and absurdly derives its title is very stupid, rather coarse, and almost vulgar: but the two great parts of Beatrice and De Flores are equally consistent, coherent, and sustained in the scenes obviously written by Middleton and in the scenes obviously written by Rowley. The subordinate part taken by Middleton in Dekker's play of "The Honest Whore" is difficult to discern from the context or to verify by inner evidence: though some likeness to his realistic or photographic method may be admitted as perceptible in the admirable picture of Bellafront's morning reception at the opening of the second act of the first part. But here we may assert with fair confidence that the first and the last scenes of the play bear the indisputable sign-manual of William Rowley. His vigorous and vivid genius, his somewhat hard and curt directness of style and manner, his clear and trenchant power of straightforward presentation or exposition, may be traced in every line as plainly as the hand of Middleton must be recognized in the main part of the tragic action intervening. To Rowley, therefore, must be assigned the very high credit of introducing and of dismissing with adequate and even triumphant effect the strangely original tragic figure which owes its fullest and finest development to the genius of Middleton. To both poets alike must unqualified and equal praise be given for the subtle simplicity of skill with which they make us appreciate the fatal and foreordained affinity between the ill-favored, rough-mannered, broken-down gentleman and the headstrong, unscrupulous, unobservant girl whose very abhorrence of him serves only to fling her down from her high station of haughty beauty into the very clutch of his ravenous and pitiless passion. Her cry of horror and astonishment at first perception of the price to be paid for a service she had thought to purchase with mere money is so wonderfully real in its artless and ingenuous sincerity that Shakespeare himself could hardly have bettered it:

Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, And shelter such a cunning cruelty, To make his death the murderer of my honor!

That note of incredulous amazement that the man whom she has just instigated to the commission of murder "can be so wicked" as to have served her ends for any end of his own beyond the pay of a professional assassin is a touch worthy of the greatest dramatist that ever lived. The perfect simplicity of expression is as notable as the perfect innocence of her surprise; the candid astonishment of a nature absolutely incapable of seeing more than one thing or holding more than one thought at a time. That she, the first criminal, should be honestly shocked as well as physically horrified by revelation of the real motive which impelled her accomplice into crime, gives a lurid streak of tragic humor to the life-like interest of the scene; as the pure infusion of spontaneous poetry throughout redeems the whole work from the charge of vulgar subservience to a vulgar taste for the presentation or the contemplation of criminal horror. Instances of this happy and natural nobility of instinct abound in the casual expressions which give grace and animation always, but never any touch of rhetorical transgression or florid superfluity, to the brief and trenchant sword-play of the tragic dialogue:

That sigh would fain have utterance: take pity on't, And lend it a free word; 'las, how it labors For liberty! I hear the murmur yet Beat at your bosom.

The wording of this passage is sufficient to attest the presence and approve the quality of a poet: the manner and the moment of its introduction would be enough to show the instinctive and inborn insight of a natural dramatist. As much may be said of the few words which give us a ghostly glimpse of supernatural terror:

Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light Betwixt that star and me! I dread thee not: 'Twas but a mist of conscience.

But the real power and genius of the work cannot be shown by extracts—not even by such extracts as these. His friend and colleague Dekker shows to better advantage by the process of selection: hardly one of his plays leaves so strong and sweet an impression of its general and complete excellence as of separate scenes or passages of tender and delicate imagination or emotion beyond the reach of Middleton: but the tragic unity and completeness of conception which distinguish this masterpiece will be sought in vain among the less firm and solid figures of his less serious and profound invention. Had "The Changeling" not been preserved, we should not have known Middleton: as it is, we are more than justified in asserting that a critic who denies him a high place among the poets of England must be not merely ignorant of the qualities which involve a right or confer a claim to this position, but incapable of curing his ignorance by any process of study. The rough and rapid work which absorbed too much of this poet's time and toil seems almost incongruous with the impression made by the noble and thoughtful face, so full of gentle dignity and earnest composure, in which we recognize the graver and loftier genius of a man worthy to hold his own beside all but the greatest of his age. And that age was the age of Shakespeare.



WILLIAM ROWLEY

Of all the poets and humorists who lit up the London stage for half a century of unequalled glory, William Rowley was the most thoroughly loyal Londoner: the most evidently and proudly mindful that he was a citizen of no mean city. I have always thought that this must have been the conscious or unconscious source of the strong and profound interest which his very remarkable and original genius had the good-fortune to evoke from the sympathies of Charles Lamb. That divine cockney, if the word may be used—and "why in the name of glory," to borrow the phrase of another immortal fellow-townsman, should it not be?—as a term of no less honor than Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman, has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or prose.

If Lamb had known and read the first work published by Rowley, it is impossible to imagine that it would not have been honored by the tribute of some passing and priceless word. Why it has never been reissued (except in a private reprint for the Percy Society) among the many less deserving and less interesting revivals from the apparently and not really ephemeral literature of its day would be to me an insoluble problem, if I were so ignorant as never to have realized the too obvious fact that chance, pure and simple chance, guides or misguides the intelligence, and suggests or fails to suggest, the duty of scholars and of students who have given time and thought to such far from unimportant or insignificant matters. "A Search for Money; or, a Quest for the Wandering Knight Monsieur L'Argent," is not comparable with the best pamphlets of Nash or of Dekker: a competent reader of those admirable improvisations will at the first opening feel inclined to regard it as a feeble and servile imitation of their quaint and obsolescent manner; but he will soon find an original and a vigorous vein of native humor in their comrade or their disciple. The seekers after the wandering knight, baffled in their search on shore, are compelled to recognize the sad fact that "the sea is lunatic, and mad folks keep no money, he would sink if he were there." The description of an usurer is memorable by its reference to the first great poet of England, among whose followers Rowley is far from the least worthy of honor. "His visage (or vizard), like the artificial Jew of Malta's nose," brings before the reader in vivid realism the likeness of Alleyn or Burbage as he represented in grotesque and tragic disguise the magnificent figure of Marlowe's creative invention or discovery by dint of genius. (I do not remember the curious verb "to rand" except in this little book: "he randed out these sentences": I presume it to be the first form of "rant.") The account of St. Paul's in 1609 is very curious and scandalous: "the very Temple itself (in bare humility) stood without his cap, and so had stood many years, many good folks had spoke for him because he could not speak for himself, and somewhat had been gathered in his behalf, but not half enough to supply his necessity."

When we pass from "the Temple" to Westminster Hall we come upon a sample of humor which would be famous if it were the gift of a less ungratefully forgotten hand.

"Here were two brothers at buffets with angels in their fists about the thatch that blew off his house into the other's garden and so spoiled a Hartichoke."

It should not have been left to a later hand—it should surely have been the privilege of Lamb's or Hazlitt's, and perhaps rather Hazlitt's than even Lamb's—to unearth and to transcribe the quaint and spirited description of Thames watermen "howling, hollowing, and calling for passengers, as if all the hags in hell had been imprisoned, and begging at the gate, fiends and furies that (God be thanked) could vex the soul but not torment it, yet indeed their most power was over the body, for here an audacious mouthing-randing-impudent-scullery-wastecoat-and-bodied rascal would have hail'd a penny from us for his scullerships."

Could Rabelais himself have described them better, or with vigor of humorous expression more heartily and enjoyably characteristic of his own all but incomparable genius?

The good old times, as remote in Shakespeare's day as in our own, were never more delightfully described than by Rowley in this noble and simple phrase: "Then was England's whole year but a St. George's day."

Webster wished that what he wrote might be read by the light of Shakespeare: an admirer of Rowley might hope and must wish that he should be read by the light of Lamb. His comedies have real as well as realistic merit: not equal to that of Dekker's or Middleton's at their best, but usually not far inferior to Heywood's or to theirs. The first of them, "A New Wonder: A Woman Never Vext," has received such immortal honor from the loving hand of Lamb that perhaps the one right thing to say of it would be an adaptation of a Catholic formula: "Agnus locutus est: causa finita est." The realism is so thorough as to make the interest something more than historical: and historically it is so valuable as well as amusing that a reasonable student may overlook the offensive "mingle-mangle" of prose and verse which cannot but painfully affect the nerves of all not congenitally insensitive readers, as it surely must have ground and grated on the ears of an audience accustomed to enjoy the prose as well as the verse of Shakespeare and his kind. No graver offence can be committed or conceived by a writer with any claim to any but contemptuous remembrance than this debasement of the currency of verse.

The character of Robert Foster is so noble and attractive in its selfless and manful simplicity that it gives us and leaves with us a more cordial sense of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator than we could feel if this gallant and homely figure were withdrawn from the stage of his invention. The female Polycrates who suffers under the curse of inevitable and intolerable good-fortune is an admirable creature of broad comedy that never subsides or overflows or degenerates into farce.

"A Match at Midnight" is as notable for vivid impression of reality, but not so likely to leave a good taste—as Charlotte Bronte might haye said—in the reader's mouth. Ancient Young, the hero, is a fine fellow; but Messrs. Earlack and Carvegut are hardly amusing enough to reconcile us to toleration of such bad company. It is cleverly composed, and the crosses and chances of the night are ingeniously and effectively invented and arranged: there is real and good broad humor in the parts of the usurer and his sons and the attractive but unwidowed Widow Wag. And I am not only free to admit but desirous to remark that a juster and more valuable judgment on such plays as these than any that I could undertake to deliver may very possibly be expected from readers whom they may more thoroughly arride—to use a favorite phrase of the all, but impeccable critic, the all but infallible judge, whose praise has set the name of Rowley so high in the rank of realistic painters and historic naturalists forever.

The copies of two dramatic nondescripts now happily preserved and duly treasured in the library of the British Museum bear inscribed in the same old hand, at the head of the first page and again on the last page under the last line, the same contemptuous three words—"silly old story." And I fear it can hardly be maintained that either Chapman, when writing "The Blind Beggar of Alexandria," or Rowley, when writing "A Shoemaker, a Gentleman," was engaged in any very rational or felicitous employment of his wayward and unregulated powers. "The Printer" of the play last named assures "the Reader" of 1638, whom he assumes to be a member of the gentle craft, that "as plays were then, some twenty years agone, it was in the fashion." A singular fashion, the rare modern reader will probably reflect: especially when he remembers how far finer and how thoroughly charming a tribute of dramatic and poetic celebration had been paid full eighteen years earlier to the same favored craft by the sweeter and rarer genius of Dekker. This quaintly apologetic assurance of by-gone popularity in subject and in style will remind all probable readers of Heywood's prologue to "The Royal King and Loyal Subject," and his dedicatory address prefixed to "The Four Prentices of London." It happily was not, however, in the printer's power to aver that such impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once breaks ground with was ever in fashion with any of his famous fellows. Nothing can be worse than the headlong and slipshod stumble of Dekker's at its worst; but his were the faults of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped work: Rowley's, if I mistake not, is the far graver error of a preposterous theory that broken verse, rough and untunable as the shock of short chopping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural speech of men and women than the rolling and flowing verse of Marlowe and of Shakespeare: which is as much liker life as it is nobler and more satisfying in workmanship. In reading bad verse the reader is constantly reminded that he is not reading good prose; and this is not the effect produced by true realism—the impression left by actual intercourse or faithful presentation of it.

The hagiology of this eccentric play is more like Shirley's in "St. Patrick for Ireland" than Dekker's and Massinger's in "The Virgin Martyr." Assuredly there is here nothing like the one incomparably lovely dialogue of Dorothea with her attendant angel. But there is the charm of a curious simplicity and sincerity in Rowley's straightforward and homely dramatic handling of the supernatural element: in the miracle of St. Winifred's well, and the conversion of Albon into St. Alban by "that seminary knight," as the tyrant Maximinus rather comically calls him, Amphiabel Prince of Wales. The courtship of the princely Offa, while disguised as the shoemaker's apprentice Crispinus, by the Roman Princess Laodice, daughter of Maximinus, is very lively and dramatic: the sprightliest scene, I should say, ever played out on the stage of Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable grossness.

This play is a perfect repertory of slang and quaint phrases: as when the master shoemaker, who has for apprentices two persecuted princes in disguise, and is a very inferior imitation of Dekker's admirable Simon Eyre, calls his wife Lady d'Oliva—whatever that may mean, and when she inquires of one of the youngsters, "What's the matter, boy? Why are so many chancery bills drawn in thy face?" Habent sua fala libelli: it is inexplicable that this most curious play should never have been republished, when the volumes of Dodsley's Old Plays, in their very latest reissue, are encumbered with heaps of such leaden dulness and such bestial filth as no decent scavenger and no rational nightman would have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and smell of any possible reader.

But it is or it should be inconceivable and incredible that the masterpiece of Rowley's strong and singular genius, a play remarkable for its peculiar power or fusion of strange powers even in the sovereign age of Shakespeare, should have waited upward of three hundred years and should still be waiting for the appearance of a second edition. The tragedy of "All's Lost by Lust," published in the same year with Shakespeare's great posthumous torso of romantic tragedy, was evidently a favorite child of its author's: the terse and elaborate argument subjoined to the careful and exhaustive list of characters may suffice to prove it. Among these characters we may note that one, "a simple clownish Gentleman," was "personated by the poet": and having noted it, we cannot but long, with a fruitless longing, for such confidences as to the impersonation of the leading characters in other memorable plays of the period. There is some really good rough humor in the part of this honest clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative reader will doubt that the author's heart was in the work devoted to the tragic and poetic scenes of a play which shows that the natural bent of his powers was toward tragedy rather than comedy. Alike as poet and as dramatist, he rises far higher and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his flight is toward the effects of imaginative terror and pity than when it is confined to the effects of humorous or pathetic realism. In the very first scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and imminent evil provoked by coalition rather than collision of the will of man with the doom of destiny; and the king's defiance of prophecy and tradition is so admirably rendered or suggested as a sign of brutal and egotistic rather than chivalrous or manful daring as to prepare the way with great dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent scenes of attempted seduction and ultimate violation. With these the underplot, interesting and original in itself, well conceived and well carried through, is happily and naturally interwoven. The noble soliloquy of the invading and defeated Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to all true lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of England. Nothing can be livelier and more natural than the scenes in which a recent bridegroom's heart is won from his loving and low-born wife by the offered hand and the sprightly seductions of a light-hearted and high-born rival. But the crowning scene of the play and the crowning grace of the poem is the interview of father and daughter after the consummation of the crime which gave Spain into the hand of the Moor. The vivid dramatic life in every word is even more admirable than the great style, the high poetic spirit of the scene. I have always ventured to wonder that Lamb, whose admiration has made it twice immortal, did not select as a companion or a counterpart to it that other great camp scene from Webster's "Appius and Virginia" in which another outraged warrior and father stirs up his friends and fellow-soldiers to vindication of his honor and revenge for his wrong. It is surely even finer and more impressive than that selected in preference to it, which closes with the immolation of Virginia.

The scenes in which the tragic underplot of Rowley's tragedy is deftly and effectively wound up are full of living action and passion; that especially in which the revenge of a deserted wife is wreaked mistakingly on the villanous minion to whose instigation she owes the infidelity of the husband for whom she mistakes him. The gross physical horrors which deform the close of a noble poem are relieved if not beautified by the great style of its age—an age unparalleled in wealth and variety of genius, a style unmatchable for its union of inspired and imaginative dignity with actual and vivid reality of impassioned and lofty life.

No comparison is possible, nor if possible could it be profitable, between the somewhat rough-hewn English oak of Rowley's play and the flawless Roman steel of Landor's great Miltonic tragedy on the same subject. The fervent praise of Southey was not too generous to be just in its estimate of that austere masterpiece; it is lamentable to remember the injustice of its illustrious author to the men of Shakespeare's day. I fear he would certainly not have excepted the noble work of his precursor from his general condemnation or impreachment of "their bloody bawdries"—a misjudgment gross enough for Hallam—or Voltaire when declining to the level of a Hallam. Landor was as headlong as these were hidebound, as fitful as they were futile; but not even the dispraise or the disrelish of a finer if not of a greater dramatic poet could affect the credit or impair the station of one on whose merits the final sentence of appreciation has been irrevocably pronounced by the verdict of Charles Lamb.



THOMAS HEYWOOD

If it is difficult to write at all on any subject once ennobled by the notice of Charles Lamb without some apprehensive sense of intrusion and presumption, least of all may we venture without fear of trespass upon ground so consecrated by his peculiar devotion as the spacious if homely province or demesne of the dramatist whose highest honor it is to have earned from the finest of all critics the crowning tribute of a sympathy which would have induced him to advise an intending editor or publisher of the dramatists of the Shakespearean age to begin by a reissue of the works of Heywood. The depth and width of his knowledge, the subtlety and the sureness of his intuition, place him so far ahead of any other critic or scholar who has ever done any stroke of work in any part of the same field that it may seem overbold for any such subordinate to express or to suggest a suspicion that this counsel would have been rather the expression of a personal and a partly accidental sympathy than the result of a critical and a purely rational consideration. And yet I can hardly think it questionable that it must have been less the poetic or essential merit than the casual or incidental associations of Heywood's work which excited so exceptional an enthusiasm in so excellent a judge. For as a matter of fact it must be admitted that in one instance at least the objections of the carper Hazlitt are better justified than the commendations of the finer and more appreciative critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the upper classes of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of Heywood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords, Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and noble characters are the finest and surest witnesses to the noble and beautiful nature of their designer's, observes that "Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen, etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in life." But such country gentlemen as his Actons and Mountfords are surely of a worse than the worst kind; more cruel or more irrational, more base or more perverse, than we need fear to see in life unless our experience should be exceptionally unfortunate. Lamb indeed is rather an advocate than a judge in the case of his fellow-Londoners Thomas Heywood and William Rowley; but his pleading is better worth our attention than the summing up of a less cordial or less competent critic.

From critics or students who regard with an academic smile of cultivated contempt the love for their country or the faith in its greatness which distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet whose devotion to his homestead was not merely that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner, no less fond and proud of his city than of his country. The quaint, homely, single-hearted municipal loyalty of an old-world burgess, conscious of his station as "a citizen of no mean city," and proud even of the insults which provincials might fling at him as a cockney or aristocrats as a tradesman, is so admirably and so simply expressed in the person of Heywood's first hero—the first in date, at all events, with whom a modern reader can hope to make acquaintance—that the nobly plebeian pride of the city poet is as unmistakably personal as the tenderness of the dramatic artist who has made the last night of the little princes in the Tower as terribly and pathetically real for the reader as Millais has made it for the spectator of the imminent tragedy. Why Shakespeare shrank from the presentation of it, and left to a humbler hand the tragic weight of a subject so charged with tenderness and terror, it might seem impertinent or impossible to conjecture—except to those who can perceive and appreciate the intense and sensitive love of children which may haply have made the task distasteful if not intolerable: but it is certain that even he could hardly have made the last words of the little fellows more touchingly and sweetly lifelike.

Were there nothing further to commend in the two parts of the historical play or chronicle history of "King Edward IV.," this would suffice to show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was not unjustified of its early and perilous venture: but the hero of these two plays is no royal or noble personage, he is plain Matthew Shore the goldsmith. We find ourselves at once in what Coleridge would have called the anachronic atmosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a champion cockney, whose interest is really much less in the rise and fall of princes than in the homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy gallantry of their apprentices. The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: the homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date and of the class to which these plays must be referred. The parts of the rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers of Heywood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were still in abeyance or in embryo. Pathos there is of a true and manly kind in the leading part of Shore; but it has little or nothing of the poignant and intense tenderness with which Heywood was afterward to invest the similar part of Frankford. Humor there is of a genuine plain-spun kind in the scenes which introduce the King as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his surroundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are presented with a comic and cordial fidelity which the painter of Falstaff's "villeggiatura," the creator of Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and conceivably have approved. It is rather in the more serious or ambitious parts that we find now and then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of manner. The recurrent burden of a jingling couplet in the cajoleries of the procuress Mrs. Blague is a survival from the most primitive and conventional form of dramatic writing not yet thoroughly superseded and suppressed by the successive influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and of Jonson; while the treatment of character in such scenes as that between Clarence, Richard, and Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for a rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and simple part of Ayre, a character worthy to have been glorified by the mention and commendation of Heywood's most devoted and most illustrious admirer, is typical of the qualities which Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the representative characters of his favorite playwright.

In that prodigious monument of learning and labor, Mr. Fleay's Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, the common attribution of these two plays to Heywood is impeached on the aesthetic score that "they are far better than his other early work." I have carefully endeavored to do what justice might be done to their modest allowance of moderate merit; but whether they be Heywood's or—as Mr. Fleay, on apparent grounds of documentary evidence, would suggest—the work of Chettle and Day, I am certainly rather inclined to agree with the general verdict of previous criticism, which would hardly admit their equality and would decidedly question their claim to anything more than equality of merit with the least admirable or memorable of Heywood's other plays. Even the rough-hewn chronicle, "If you know not me you know nobody," by which "the troubles of Queen Elizabeth" before her accession are as nakedly and simply set forth in the first part as in the second are "the building of the Royal Exchange" and "the famous victory" over the Invincible Armada, has on the whole more life and spirit, more interest and movement, in action as in style. The class of play to which it belongs is historically the most curious if poetically the least precious of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood in earnest or by Shakespeare in jest as popular or ambitious of popularity on the stage for which they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or caricature, more or less ineffectually trammelled by the chance or the likelihood of prosecution and repression, is common under various forms to various ages and countries; but the serious introduction and presentation of contemporary figures and events give to such plays as these as mixed and peculiar a quality as though the playwright's aim or ambition had been to unite in his humble and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or patriotic historian and a political or social caricaturist; a poet and a pamphleteer on the same page, a chronicler and a jester in the same breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next to none. In Thomas Drue's play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part of the same ground is gone over in much the same fashion and to much the same effect; but the subject, a single interlude of the Marian persecution, has more unity of interest than can be attained by any play running on the same line as Heywood's, from the opening to the close of the most hideous episode in our history. That the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should have been "staged to the show" for the edification and confirmation of her half-sister's subjects in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than that the same hopelessly improper topic for historical drama should in later days have been selected for dramatic treatment by English writers and on one occasion by a great English poet. As there are within the range of any country's history, authentic or traditional, periods and characters in themselves so naturally fit and proper for transfiguration by poetry that the dramatist who should attempt to improve on the truth—the actual or imaginary truth accepted as fact with regard to them—would probably if not certainly derogate from it, so are there others which cannot be transfigured without transformation. Such a character is the last and wretchedest victim of a religious reaction which blasted her kingdom with the hell-fire of reviving devil-worship, and her name with the ineffaceable brand of an inseparable and damning epithet. If even the genius of Tennyson could not make the aspirations and the agonies of Mary as acceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic point of view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could make the sufferings of such poor wretches as their Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be expected that the humbler if more dramatic genius of Heywood should have triumphed over the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily repulsive: but it is curious that both should have attempted to tackle the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle history" of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare's self attempted it, could scarcely have been other—if we may judge by our human and fallible lights of the divine possibilities open to a superhuman and infallible intelligence—than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or poetic point of view. The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have been to invent, to devise, to create; not to modify, to adapt, to adjust. Bloody Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and poetic malefactress: but only by the most audacious and magnificent defiance of history and possibility. Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia (to use the proper ceremonial style adopted for the exquisitely tender and graceful dedication of the "Asolani") died peaceably in the odor of incense offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin verse of such accomplished poets and acolytes as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi. Nothing more tragic or dramatic could have been made of her peaceful and honorable end than of the reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history. The greatest poet and dramatist of the nineteenth century has chosen to immortalize them by violence—to give them a life, or to give a life to their names, which history could not give. Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the creation of a living and eternal truth. One thing may be registered to the credit, not indeed of the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the man and the Englishman: the generous fair play shown to Philip II. in the scene which records his impartial justice done upon the Spanish assassin of an English victim. There is a characteristic manliness about Heywood's patriotism which gives a certain adventitious interest to his thinnest or homeliest work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a quality. In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play: which is indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or even an irregular historical drama. Again the trusty cockney poet has made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman: and has made of him at once a really noble and a heartily amusing figure. His better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman d'Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap; though in the earlier passages of Parisian trickery and buffoonery there is a note of broad humor which may remind us of Moliere—not of course the Moliere of Tartuffe, but the Moliere of M. de Pourceaugnac. The curious alterations made in later versions of the closing scene are sometimes though not generally for the better.

Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared that "posterity is bound to take care" (an obligation, I fear, of a kind which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) "that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty" as that which induced Heywood to set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in the rascally interest of those "harlotry players" who thought it, forsooth, "against their peculiar profit to have them come in print." But I am not sure that it was altogether a noble or at all a rational modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt: "It never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read." For, eight years after this well-known passage was in print, when publishing a "Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable passages of this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles," he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, "an apologie of the Author" for slurring or skipping the record of her life and times in a curious passage which curiously omits as unworthy of mention his dramatic work on the subject, while complacently enumerating his certainly less valuable and memorable other tributes to the great queen's fame as follows: "To write largely of her troubles, being a princesse, or of her rare and remarkable Reigne after she was Queen, I should but feast you with dyet twice drest: Having my selfe published a discourse of the first: from her cradle to her crowne; and in another bearing Title of the nine worthy Women: she being the last of the rest in time and place; though equall to any of the former both in religious vertue, and all masculine magnanimity." This surely looks but too much as though the dramatist and poet thought more of the chronicler and compiler than of the truer Heywood whose name is embalmed in the affection and admiration of his readers even to this day; as though the author of "A Challenge for Beauty," "The Fair Maid of the West," and "A Woman Killed with Kindness," must have hoped and expected to be remembered rather as the author of "Troja Britannica," "Gynaikeion," "The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels," and even this "Life of Merlin, sirnamed Ambrosius. His Prophesies, and Predictions Interpreted; and their truth made good by our English Annalls": undoubtedly, we may believe, "a Subject never published in this kind before, and deserves" (sic) "to be knowne and observed by all men." Here follows the motto: "Quotque aderant Vates, rebar adesse Deos." The biographer and chronographer would apparently have been less flattered than surprised to hear that he would be remembered rather as the creator of Frankford, Mountferrers, and Geraldine, than as the chronicler of King Brute, Queen Elizabeth, and King James.

The singular series of plays which covers much the same ground as Caxton's immortal and delightful chronicle of the "Histories" of Troy may of course have been partially inspired by that most enchanting "recuyell": but Heywood, as will appear on collation or confrontation of the dramatist with the historian, must have found elsewhere the suggestion of some of his most effective episodes. The excellent simplicity and vivacity of style, the archaic abruptness of action and presentation, are equally noticeable throughout all the twenty-five acts which lead us from the opening of the Golden to the close of the Iron Age; but there is a no less perceptible advance or increase of dramatic and poetic invention in the ten acts devoted to the tale of Troy and its sequel. Not that there is anywhere any want of good simple spirited work, homely and lively and appropriate to the ambitious humility of the design; a design which aims at making popular and familiar to the citizens of Elizabethan London the whole cycle of heroic legend from the reign of Saturn to the death of Helen. Jupiter, the young hero of the first two plays and ages, is a really brilliant and amusing mixture of Amadis, Sigurd, and Don Juan: the pretty scene in which his infant life is spared and saved must be familiar, and pleasantly familiar, to all worthy lovers of Charles Lamb. The verse underlined and immortalized by his admiration—"For heaven's sake, when you kill him, hurt him not"—should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer. I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals, could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism. There is spirit of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of war and adventure that follow: Heywood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn and the Titans very human and simple figures, whose doings and sufferings are presented with child-like straightforwardness in smooth and fluent verse and in dialogue which wants neither strength nor ease nor propriety. The subsequent episode of Danae is treated with such frank and charming fusion of realism and romance as could only have been achieved in the age of Shakespeare. To modern readers it may seem unfortunate for Heywood that a poet who never (to the deep and universal regret of all competent readers) followed up the dramatic promise of his youth, as displayed in the nobly vivid and pathetic little tragedy of "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," should in our day have handled the story of Danae and the story of Bellerophon so effectively as to make it impossible for the elder poet either to escape or to sustain comparison with the author of "The Earthly Paradise"; but the most appreciative admirers of Morris will not be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to the admirable qualities displayed in Heywood's dramatic treatment of these legends. The naturally sweet and spontaneous delicacy of the later poet must not be looked for in the homely and audacious realism of Heywood; in whose work the style of the Knight's Tale and the style of the Miller's Tale run side by side and hand in hand.

From the Golden Age to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood's dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation or degradation of the classical four ages. "The Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; in "The Silver Age" the process of evolution is already visible at work. Bellerophon and Aurea cannot certainly be compared with the Joseph and Phraxanor of Charles Wells: but the curt and abrupt scene in which they are hastily thrust on the stage and as hastily swept off it is excellently composed and written. The highest possible tribute to the simple and splendid genius of Plautus is paid by the evidence of the fact that all his imitators have been obliged to follow so closely on the lines of his supernatural, poetical, and farcical comedy of Amphitryon. Heywood, Rotrou, Moliere, and Dryden have sat at his feet and copied from his dictation like school-boys. The French pupils, it must be admitted, have profited better and shown themselves apter and happier disciples than the English. I cannot think that even Moliere has improved on the text of Rotrou as much, or nearly as much, as he has placed himself under unacknowledged obligation to his elder countryman: but in Dryden's version there is a taint of greasy vulgarity, a reek of obtrusive ruffianism, from which Heywood's version is as clean as Shakespeare's could have been, had he bestowed on the "Amphitruo" the honor he conferred on the "Menaechmi." The power of condensation into a few compact scenes of material sufficient for five full acts is a remarkable and admirable gift of Heywood's.

After the really dramatic episode in which he had the advantage of guidance by the laughing light of a greater comic genius than his own, Heywood contentedly resumes the simple task of arranging for the stage a mythological chronicle of miscellaneous adventure. The jealousy of Juno is naturally the mainspring of the action and the motive which affords some show of connection or coherence to the three remaining acts of "The Silver Age": the rape of Proserpine, the mourning and wandering and wrath of Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. The second of the five plays composing it closes with the rescue of Proserpine by Hercules, and the judgment of Jupiter on "the Arraignment of the Moon."

In "The Brazen Age" there is somewhat more of dramatic unity or coherence than in the two bright easy-going desultory plays which preceded it: it closes at least with a more effective catastrophe than either of them in the death of Hercules. However far inferior to the haughty and daring protest or appeal in which Sophocles, speaking through the lips of the virtuous Hyllus, impeaches and denounces the iniquity of heaven with a steadfast and earnest vehemence unsurpassed in its outspoken rebellion by any modern questioner or blasphemer of divine providence, the simple and humble sincerity of the English playwright has given a not unimpressive or inharmonious conclusion to the same superhuman tragedy. In the previous presentation of the story of Meleager, Heywood has improved upon the brilliant and passionate rhetoric of Ovid by the introduction of an original and happy touch of dramatic effect: his Althaea, after firing the brand with which her son's life is destined to burn out, relents and plucks it back for a minute from the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite from torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength and spirit, before she rekindles it. The pathos of his farewell has not been overpraised by Lamb: who might have added a word in recognition of the very spirited and effective suicide of Althaea, not unworthily heralded or announced in such verses as these: