personages or the action. The main issues presented to us arewhat is the cause of the Prince of Cyprus's melancholy, and whether he will recover from it. It is hinted that this melancholy may have dangerous consequences-that discontent is muttering at home, and that enemies are gathering on the borders of the kingdom, presuming on the inactivity of the prince; but these consequences, instead of being powerfully represented, so as to throw the interest of a mixed audience keenly on the prince's dejection and indifference to affairs of state, are only dimly and faintly mentioned, in such a way that no ordinary hearer would perceive their importance. In the underplot we are never agitated by any fear of an untoward issue. We never have any serious apprehension that the haughty Thaumasta will eventually reject Menaphon, or that the noble and prosperous Amethus will falter in his love to Cleophila. And the story of the Prince Palador and his mistress Eroclea, with its picture of the forlorn Eroclea, and its finely wrought presentation of their reunion, is not by itself, without further development, enough for a drama: it is better suited for a descriptive epic.

It is only in his two great tragedies, the "Broken Heart" and ""Tis Pity she's a Whore," that Ford's power is unmistakably shown. In them he has to deal, from the first scene, with men under the full sway of intelligible passion; and in the presence of passion his haughtiness, his reserve, his indifference, vanishes, and he enters earnestly into the work of interpretation. The second of these two plays, in spite of the harsh, affected, and offensive levity of the title, is Ford's masterpiece,—the play that justifies Mr Swinburne's eloquent panegyric, and will always be most in the critic's mind in all attempts to fix Ford's place among the dramatists. In the "Broken Heart," notwithstanding its many powerful and touching passages, there is somewhat too much of learned delineation of character: the noble heroism of strength and impetuosity in Ithocles and Calantha is too obtrusively balanced against the tamer heroism of determined endurance in the other pair of lovers, Orgilus and Penthea. All the persons of the drama have names expressive of their leading qualities; and at the close, our wonder at the strangeness of the lunatic jealousy of Bassanes, the pitiless, dogged, irreconcilable revengefulness of Orgilus, the bitter constancy of Penthea in starving herself to death, seriously obstructs the nobler emotions of horror and pity. Even the closing scene, in which the heroic Calantha hears of the death of her father and her lover, and gives no sign of sorrow till the duties of her high state have been performed, when her overstrained heart-strings break, and she falls dead on the body of her slain lover, is more likely to stun and amaze all but the select few, than to come home powerfully to their sympathies. But there are

no such scholarly obstructions to the terrible tragedy of fate-driven love between Brother and Sister. In it passion is supreme from the first scene to the last.

A man can never wholly hide a ruling tendency in his nature; and even Ford's great tragedies are not without traces of his harshness and severity. There is something very unsatisfactory in the characters of Bassanes and Vasques: it frets and vexes us at the end to see such base deformities stand by and triumph at the fall of nobler natures. We may think them unworthy of the sword of poetic justice—we may reason them out of the sphere of guilt in the tragedy; but their triumph disconcerts us.

X.—PHILIP MASSINGER (1584-1640).

Massinger had less original force than any of the other great dramatists. He was eminently a cultivated dramatist, a man of broad, liberal, adaptive mind, fluent and versatile, with just conceptions of dramatic effect, and the power of giving copious expression to his conceptions without straining or dislocating effort. Yet he was much too strong and vigorous to be a mere imitator. His nature was not such as to fight against the influence of his great predecessors: his mind opened itself genially to their work, and absorbed their materials and their methods; but he did not simply reproduce them-they decomposed, so to speak, in his mind, and lay there ready to be laid hold of and embodied in new organisms. So far he resembled Shakespeare, in that he had good sense enough not to harass himself in straining after little novelties his judgment was broad and manly. But he was far from resembling Shakespeare in swiftness and originality of imagination: his muse was comparatively tame and even-paced. The common remark that his diction is singularly free from archaisms shows us one aspect of the soundness of his taste, and bears testimony, at the same time, to his want of eccentricity and original force. He was the Gray of his generation-greater than Gray, inasmuch as his generation was greater than Gray's-a man of large, open, fertile, and versatile mind.

His personal career is obscure. His father was a servant" in the family of the Herberts of Pembroke, as we know from the dedication of his "Bondman," and "spent many years in the service of that honourable house;" but whether the service was menial, or such as might be rendered by a gentleman, there is no means of ascertaining. At any rate, Massinger's position was not such as to prevent him from going to Oxford in 1602, or from being in a debtor's prison about 1614, and under the necessity of joining with two others in begging an advance of £5 from Henslowe to procure his release. From the almost desperate

mendicancy of his dedications, which are the extreme opposites of Ford's, one would judge him to have lived in wretched poverty and the entry of his death in the register of St Saviour's "buried Philip Massinger, a stranger "-gives us no ground for hoping against the most natural inference.

The probability is that Massinger began to write for the stage about 1606, if not a year or two earlier, going up from the university as Marlowe and Thomas Nash had done some twenty years before, in search of literary fame and the mysteries of London life. He did not, however, begin to publish till much later, his first printed play being "The Virgin Martyr," which appeared in 1622, and in which he had the assistance of Dekker. Only twelve of his plays were published during his lifetime, out of the thirty-seven which he is known to have written. Perhaps we have the less reason to regret this, because the plays published in his lifetime are decidedly superior to those published after his death. He himself saw in print, besides "The Virgin Martyr," "The Duke of Milan," 1623; "The Bondman," 1624; "The Roman Actor," 1629; "The Picture," 1630; "The Fatal Dowry," 1632; "The Maid of Honour," 1632; "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," 1633; and "The Great Duke of Florence," 1636. After all, it may be that Mr Warburton's cook, who is said to have covered his pies and lighted his fires with some twelve of Massinger's plays, may have done both the world and the poet

a service.

Gifford entertained the notion that Massinger must have turned Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. The notion is based upon the use that Massinger makes of a Roman Catholic legend in "The Virgin Martyr," and the fair character that he gives to a Jesuit priest in "The Renegado." One wants proof more relative : this only proves that Massinger was able to treat Roman Catholics with dramatic impartiality.1 Coleridge's notion about Massinger's democratic leanings is equally questionable. Massinger, indeed, makes one of his characters sigh for the happy times when lords were styled fathers of families. He makes another say that princes do well to cherish goodness where they find it, for—

They being men and not gods, Contarino,
They can give wealth and titles, but not virtues."

He makes Timoleon administer a sharp rebuke to the men of Syracuse for corruption prevailing in high places, and rate them soundly for preferring golden dross to liberty.

In the same play ("The Bondman"), he takes an evident pleasure in representing the indignities put upon high-fed madams by their insurgent slaves: and in "The City Madam" he ridicules 1 But see article on Massinger in 'Encyclopædia Britannica.'

with much zest the pretensions of upstart wealth. But all these things are as consistent with a benevolent paternal Toryism as with Whiggery, and are to be looked upon as indications simply of the dramatist's range of sympathies, and not of any discontent on his part with the established framework of government or society.

Hartley Coleridge, in his rambling and racy introduction to Massinger and Ford, commits himself to the extraordinary statement that Massinger had no humour. Massinger would have been the dullest of jokers, if Ford had not contrived to be still duller." I have already remarked on the severity and ungeniality of Ford's character; but there is nothing connected with Massinger to imply that he bore the least resemblance to Ford in this point. On the contrary, all Massinger's characteristics are those of a widely sympathetic man, with a genial propensity to laughter. He has written several very obscene passages, such as the courtship of Asotus by Corisca in "The Bondman," but they are all pervaded by genuine humour; and a countless number of his scenes, such as that between Wellborn and Marrall in "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," are irresistibly laughable. It may perhaps be said with justice that there is often a certain serious motive underlying Massinger's humour, which connects itself with the earnestness of his distressed life; but humour he undoubtedly had, and that of the most ebullient and irrepressible sort.

One fancies indeed, but it may be the result of our knowledge of his painful life, that there is a certain sad didactic running through all Massinger's work. The "Duke of Milan," by far his greatest drama, has not the satisfying close of Shakespeare's tragedies. It preaches directly the moral deducible from "Romeo and Juliet," that violent delights have violent ends; but whereas we do not vex ourselves with vain wishes that Romeo and Juliet had been united in happy marriage, we are at the death of Sforza and Marcelia disconcerted by the feeling that their fate ought to have been, and easily might have been, different. And in his other tragedies we are haunted at the close by a similar uneasiness the purgation of the mind by pity and terror is not effected -the tumult that they raise is not tranquillised. All tragedies, of course, are susceptible of a didactic interpretation; but those in which the didactic has a sharp edge, affect us in quite a different way from those in which it is vaguely present as part of a grand and overwhelming impression; and Massinger's conclusions have a sharp edge. Again, his romantic tragi-comedies, and even his comedies, have also a serious tinge, apart from the natural interest of the development of the story. They do not directly preach at us, but the colour of the subject-matter suggests that the dramatist was not wholly free-minded and studious only of dramatic and scenic impressions.

XI. JAMES SHIRLEY (1596-1667).

More is known about Shirley than about some of his more distinguished, or at least abler contemporaries. He was born in London, and educated at Merchant Tailors' School, St John's College, Oxford, and Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He took orders, and was presented to a living in Hertfordshire; but in a short time he became Roman Catholic, left his living, turned schoolmaster for a while; and at last, finding this employment also "uneasy to him, he retired to the metropolis, lived in Gray's Inn, and set up for a playmaker." He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when he went up to London (probably in 1624 or 1625), and in the course of a few years he got into the full swing of dramatic composition, and produced plays at the rate of two or three or four a-year. The chief were- Love's Tricks," a comedy, 1625; "The Maid's Revenge," a tragedy, 1626; "The Brothers," a comedy, 1626; "The Witty Fair One," a comedy, 1628; "The Wedding," a comedy, 1628; "The Grateful Servant," a tragi-comedy, 1629; "The Changes, or Love in a Maze," 1632; "The Ball" (written in conjunction with Chapman, but almost wholly Shirley's), 1632; "The Gamester," a comedy, 1633; "The Example" (containing an imitation of Ben Jonson's humours), 1634; "The Opportunity," 1634; "The Traitor," a tragedy (perhaps Shirley's best), 1635; "The Lady of Pleasure" (perhaps the best of his comedies), 1635; “The Cardinal," a tragedy (an attempt to compete with Webster's "Duchess of Malfi"), 1641. Under the Commonwealth, Shirley, after some vicissitudes during the civil war, was obliged to return to his old trade of teaching; and at the Restoration, though several of his plays were revived, he made no attempt to resume his connection with the stage.

Shirley's first essay in print was a poem entitled "Echo" (afterwards printed under the more suggestive title of "Narcissus"). A man's youthful work is always a good index of his tendencies and powers, and in this poem the nature of Shirley's gifts shines unmistakably through the lines. He goes boldly to work with jaunty self-assured ease: there is pith and "go" in his style; he is borne on with pride in his triumphs of expression, but he is victorious with weapons which other men have provided. He has no originality of idea, or situation, or diction.

The same thing strikes us in his plays. Lamb says of him that "he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common. But the really great men of the race, not merely Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, but Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and Massinger, spoke the same language with a differ