acter and habits.

Dekker's being born in London, and his exceptional acquaintance with strange bedfellows in the course of his miserable life, gave him an advantage as the abstract and brief chronicle of the time over Shakespeare, who was bred in the country, and passed a comparatively prosperous and respectable life in London apart altogether from the fact that Shakespeare's imagination would not let him rest content with so close a transcript of nature.

V. THOMAS MIDDLETON (1570-1627).

Middleton has not Dekker's lightness of touch and etherial purity of tenderness, but there are qualities in which he comes nearer than any contemporary dramatist to the master mind of the time. There is a certain imperial confidence in his use of words and imagery, a daring originality and impatient force of expression, an easy freedom of humour, wide of range yet thoroughly well in hand, such as we find in the same degree even in that age of giants in no Elizabethan saving only Shakespeare. It was as a comedian that Middleton first made his reputation, about the year 1607, comparatively late in life; and it would seem that he despaired of obtaining recognition for his powers in tragedy, for two of his most striking performances in that kind are interwoven with comic stories and the whole plays named after leading characters in the comic under-plot. Nobody would expect from the title of the "Mayor of Queenborough," the intensity and force that Middleton shows in the tragic scenes of that play. The title seems to require our attention for the humorous antics of the Mayor, Simon the tanner, an imitation of Dekker's Simon Eyre the shoemaker, Mayor of London. And similarly in "The Changeling," which Middleton wrote in conjunction with Rowley, the dramatists seem to modestly intimate that they set store chiefly on the comic portions. Yet there are tragic passages in "The Changeling" unsurpassed for intensity of passion and appalling surprises in the whole range of Elizabethan literature. That these scenes were devised and written by Middleton will hardly be doubted by anybody acquainted with "The Mayor of Queenborough," and his later pure tragedy, "Women Beware Women." This last play is literally open to Jonson's sarcastic note on "Hamlet"-"Here the play of necessity ends, all the actors being killed." The slaughter in "Women Beware Women" extends to every character honoured with a name. Regarded as wholes, Middleton's tragedies fall very far short of the dignity of Shakespeare's. His heroes and heroines are not made of the same noble stuff, and their calamities have not the

same grandeur. The characters are all so vile that the pity and terror produced by their death is almost wholly physical. But in the expression of incidental moments of passion, Middleton often rises to a sublime pitch of energy.

It may have been that Middleton, though only six years younger than Shakespeare, was born too late for tragedy. A complaint is made in "The Roaring Girl," in the composition of which he was conjoined with Dekker, that tragedies had gone out of fashion. "In the time of the great crop doublet," it is said, "your huge bombasted plays quilted with mighty words to lean purpose, were only then in the fashion; and as the doublet fell, neater inventions began to be set up." Under King James the taste was all for "light colour summer stuff, mingled with divers colours." Thus by the time that Middleton came into favour as a playwright, the atmosphere of the theatre was not encouraging to tragic composition. How far this influenced him in the devotion of his versatile powers to comedy, and how much was due to his individual character, it is of course impossible now to determine, for we have nothing but his plays to judge by. He began his literary life, like Marston, as a satirist, writing in the style popular at the end of the sixteenth century; but he achieved no great success in this artificial line of composition. His first triumph as a writer of comedy would seem to have been "A Trick to Catch the Old One." This, along with four others, was licensed in 1607. Chapman's "All Fools," the great exemplar and prototype of the English comedy of "gulling," had taken the town two years before, and Middleton threw himself into the fashion. In this type of comedy he is exceedingly happy, and surpasses his masters in ingenuity of construction, and easy accumulation of mirthful circumstances. The fun begins early, and goes on to the end with accelerating speed. Middleton excels peculiarly in the dramatic irony of making his gulls accessory to their own deception, and putting into their mouths statements that have, to those in the secret, a meaning very much beyond what they intend. "A Mad World, my Masters," licensed in 1608, is one of his happiest efforts in this vein. As bearing on Jonson's description of him as "a base fellow," it may be remarked that he professes to be more decent than some of his predecessors, and has a gird apparently at Marston or Jonson, as some obscene fellow, who cares not what he writes against others, yet rips up the most nasty vice in his own plays, and presents it to a

1 This play furnished the plot of Massinger's "New Way to Pay Old Debts." The titles of the plays, in fact, are interchangeable: both the scapegrace heroes extract by the same device rather more than their rights from usurious and grasping uncles. The character of Sir Giles has more force than any creation of Middleton's; but the germ of the character was probably taken from Middleton's "Pecunious Lucre," or Sir Alexander Wargrave in "The Roaring Girl."

modest assembly. It is the excellency of a writer, says Middleton, to leave things better than he finds them. According to this principle, in the "Trick to Catch the Old One," and the "Mad World," the courtesans are married and made honest women—the rakes are reclaimed; and though no lesson is weightily inculcated, there is less indecency than in the works of more pretentious moralists.

Middleton's name has of late been revived in connection with the authorship of "Macbeth." It has been conjectured, on the ground of certain slight coincidences between Middleton's play and the witch scenes, that Middleton had a hand in the composition of "Macbeth." 1 The supposition is about as groundless as any ever made in connection with Shakespeare, which is saying a good deal. Even if either author borrowed the words of the song from the other, that is no evidence of further co-operation. The plays are wholly different in spirit. "The Witch" is by no means one of Middleton's best plays. The plot is both intricate and feeble ; and the witches, in spite of Charles Lamb's exquisite comparison of them with Shakespeare's, are, as stage creations, essentially comic and spectacular. With their ribald revelry, their cauldrons, their hideous spells and weird incantations, they are much more calculated to excite laughter than fear as exhibited on the stage, however much fitted to touch the chords of superstitious dread when transported by the imagination to their native wilds. The characters of the play do not treat them with sufficient respect to command the sympathy of the audience for them. Familiarity breeds contempt: if they had been consulted only by the Duchess with a view to the murder of her husband, they might have kept up an appearance of dignity and terror; but when the drunk Almachildes staggers in among them, upsets some of the beldams, and is received by Hecate as a favoured lover, we cease to have much respect for them, even though they do profess to exercise the terrible power of raising jars, jealousies, strifes, and heartburning disagreements like a thick scarf o'er life. The visit of the fantastical gentleman whom Hecate has thrice enjoyed in incubus, is a very happy inspiration in the same vein as Tam o' Shanter's admiration of the heroine of Alloway Kirk the scene is a fine opportunity for a comic actor; but it is damaging to the respectability of the dread Hecate.

1 The chief resemblances are, that both poets introduce Hecate as the queen of the witches, and that the songs "Come away " and "Black Spirits," of which only the first words are given in " Macbeth," are set down in full in "The Witch." "The Witch" was not printed till 1778, when it was discovered in MS. by Mr Isaac Reed. If the songs were popular witch-songs, whether written before or after Shakespeare wrote "Macbeth," they may have been adopted in the stage copy of the play.

VI.--JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625).

It is not without compunction that one ventures to dissolve the long-established union between the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to characterise the second and principal member by himself. The rigour of my plan demands it. There are ample materials for forming an estimate of Fletcher, because he wrote plays unassisted probably before, and certainly after, his partnership with Beaumont; while in groping after the character of Beaumont we must trust chiefly to imperfect materials—a masque, a few poems, vague traditions, and arbitrary recognition of portions of his joint work with Fletcher. If there had been marked differences between the plays written by Fletcher alone, and those written by him in conjunction with Beaumont, one might have proceeded with some confidence to allocate their respective shares in the joint compositions. But I must confess for myself that there is no passage in any of the joint plays that I could affirm with any confidence not to be Fletcher's-not to contain traces of his hand. Of the three plays in which it is known for certain that Beaumont took part - the "Maid's Tragedy," "Philaster," and "A King and No King”—all have the same complexion as Fletcher's single compositions, similar characters, similar sentiments, and similar impelling forces. One would expect the metre to be a good criterion of separate identity. The abundance of feminine endings in Fletcher's undoubted verse, and his habit of running one line into another, have been suggested as tests; but the application of these tests is rendered uncertain by the fact that they do not apply to Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess." We cannot pick out certain passages as being Beaumont's, simply on the ground that they contain a smaller proportion of feminine endings than certain other passages which may be supposed to be Fletcher's. On the whole, I see no reason to doubt the opinion currrent during the reign of Charles I., and communicated by Bishop Earle to Aubrey, that Beaumont's chief share in the plays lay in correcting the exuberance of Fletcher. Almost all the commendatory poems_prefixed to the edition of 1647-poems by Denham, Waller, Lovelace, Herrick, Lowell, Cartwright, Richard Brome, &c.-are addressed to Fletcher alone. Richard Brome, Jonson's servant and pupil, who knew Fletcher intimately, and was as likely as any man to be aware of the exact relationship between the two dramatists, gives all the glory to Fletcher. The truth probably is, that Beaumont applied his superior judgment to the task of amending Fletcher's first drafts, seeing that his prolific partner was strongly averse to the labour of correction. I cannot say that there is any one scene in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher which I

should feel warranted in assigning to Beaumont alone, although it is quite possible that he contributed whole Scenes, if not whole Acts.

All the dramatists hitherto considered in our survey agree in being men of humble extraction, who had to fight their way in the world through manifold difficulties. Fletcher is only partly an exception to this agreement. He was the son of a Kentish clergyman, who rose to the rank of bishop; but his father died in 1596, when he was seventeen years old, and left a widow and a large family in distressed circumstances. Five years before his father's death, Fletcher had entered Bennet College, Cambridge, and he was resident there in 1593. No other particulars of his private life have been ascertained. He seems to have begun to write for the stage about 1606, the supposed date of his "WomanHater"; and before he was cut off by the plague in 1625, he had written or co-operated in writing no less than sixty plays.

Fletcher entered the dramatic field when the rivalry of wit was at its hottest. He belonged to the lighter build of combatantsthe saucy bark, rather than the imperious, proud, full sail. It is significant of his personal appearance that his portraits were considered failures: there was no catching the quick play of his vivacious features. His first dramatic effort-if the "WomanHater" is so-was in the mock-heroic vein, and gave proof of a comic genius second only to Shakespeare's. There are two comic heroes in the play-Gondarino, a ridiculously ill-conditioned and techy hater of women ; and Lazarillo, a fanatic and insatiable gourmand. Gondarino's sourness takes the fancy of a mischiefloving young lady, Oriana, who amuses herself and gives rise to some most ludicrous scenes by making violent love to the old porcupine, very much to his disgust. In the pursuit of her whim, however, she compromises herself by equivocal behaviour, and narrowly escapes falling a victim to the cynic's ludicrously diabolical project of revenge. Alongside this series of incidents, and partly interwoven with them, runs the mock-heroic passion of Lazarillo, whose sole aim in life is to get possession of dainty food without paying for it. His goddess is Plenty, and his daily prayer to her is, "Fill me this day with some rare delicates." A sumptuous feast is the sacrifice that he vows to perform. Bills of fare are his holy scriptures, which he never fails to take up with reverence. Lazarillo's page, whose office it is to haunt the kitchens of the great, and bring instant word of forthcoming dishes, in order that his master may devise stratagems and ambuscades to procure a taste of them, one day reports that the Duke's table is to be graced by the head of an Umbrana. "Is it possible?" cries Lazarillo; can heaven be so propitious to the Duke?" forthwith he vows to pursue this Umbrana's head with all his

And