Wandering in the dark all night.

O when will this same Year of Night have end?
Long-look'd for Day's sun, when wilt thou ascend?
Let not this thief-friend misty veil of night
Encroach on day, and shadow thy fair light;
Whilst thou comest tardy from thy Thetis' bed,
Blushing forth golden-hair and glorious red.
O stay not long, bright lanthern of the day,
To light my mist-way feet to my right way.

we

[The pleasant Comedy, from which these Extracts are taken, is contemporary with some of the earliest of Shakspeare's, and is no whit inferior to either the Comedy of Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew, for instance. It is full of business, humour and merry malice. Its night-scenes are peculiarly sprightly and wakeful. The versification unencumbered, and rich with compound epithets. Why do we go on with ever new Editions of Ford, and Massinger, and the thrice reprinted Selections of Dodsley? what we want is as many volumes more, as these latter consist of, filled with plays (such as this), of which we know comparatively nothing. Not a third part of the Treasures of old English Dramatic literature has been exhausted. Are w afraid that the genius of Shakspeare would suffer in our estimate by the disclosure? He would indeed be somewhat lessened as a miracle and a prodigy. But he would lose no height by the confession. When a Giant is shown to us, does it detract from the curiosity to be told that he has at home a gigantic brood of brethren, less only than himself? Along with him, not from him, sprang up the race of mighty Dramatists who, compared with the Otways and Rowes that followed, were as Miltons to a Young or an Akenside. That he was their elder Brother, not their Parent, is evident from the fact of the very few direct imitations of him to be found in their writings. Webster, Decker, Heywood, and the rest of his great contemporaries went on their own ways, and followed their individual impulses, not blindly prescribing to themselves his tract. Marlowe, the true (though imperfect)

The comedy of Fletcher 'Tis out of no detracting

Father of our tragedy, preceded him. is essentially unlike to that of his. spirit that I speak thus, for the plays of Shakspeare have been the strongest and the sweetest food of my mind from infancy; but I resent the comparative obscurity in which some of his most valuable co-operators remain, who were his dear intimates, his stage and his chamber-fellows while he lived, and to whom his gentle spirit doubtlessly then awarded the full portion of their genius, as from them toward himself appears to have been në grudging of his acknowledged excellence.]

THE FAIR MAID OF THE EXCHANGE: A COMEDY, BY THOMAS HEYWOOD, 1637.

Cripple offers to fit Frank Golding with ready made Love Epistles.

Frank. Of thy own writing?

Crip. My own, I assure you, Sir.

Frank. Faith, thou hast robb'd some sonnet-book or other,

And now would'st make me think they are thy own.
Crip. Why, think'st thou that I cannot write a Letter,
Ditty, or Sonnet, with judicial phrase,

As pretty, pleasing, and pathetical,
As the best Ovid-imitating dunce
In the whole town?

Frank. I think thou canst not.
Crip. Yea, I'll swear I cannot.

Yet, Sirrah, I could coney-catch the world,
Make myself famous for a sudden wit,

And be admired for my dexterity,

Were I disposed.

Frank. I prithee, how?

Crip. Why, thus, There lived a Poet in this town
(If we may term our modern writers Poets),
Sharp-witted, bitter-tongued; his pen, of steel;
His ink was temper'd with the biting juice
And extracts of the bitterest weeds that grew;
He never wrote but when the elements
Of fire and water tilted in his brain.
This fellow, ready to give up his ghost
To Lucia's bosom, did bequeath to me
His Library, which was just nothing

But rolls, and scrolls, and bundles of cast wit,
Such as durst never visit Paul's Church Yard.
Amongst 'em all I lighted on a quire

Or two of paper, fill'd with Songs and Ditties.
And here and there a hungry Epigram;
These I reserve to my own proper use,
And Pater-noster-like have conn'd them all.
I could now, when I am in company,
At ale-house, tavern, or an ordinary,
Upon a theme make an extemporal ditty
(Or one at least should seem extemporal),
Out of the abundance of this Legacy,
That all would judge it, and report it too,
To be the infant of a sudden wit,
And then were I an admirable fellow.

Frank. This were a piece of cunning.

Crip. I could do more; for I could make enquiry, Where the best-witted gallants use to dine,

Follow them to the tavern, and there sit

In the next room with a calve's head and brimstone,
And over-hear their talk, observe their humours,
Collect their jests, put them into a play,

And tire them too with payment to behold
What I have filch'd from them. This I could do.

But O for shame that man should so arraign

Their own fee-simple wits for verbal theft !
Yet men there be that have done this and that,
And more by much more than the most of them

After this specimen of the pleasanter vein of Heywood, I am tempted to extract some lines from his "Hierarchie of Angels, 1634;" not strictly as a Dramatic Poem, but because the passage contains a string of names, all but that of Watson, his contemporary Dramatists. He is complaining in a mood half serious, half comic, of the disrespect which Poets in his own times meet with from the world, compared with the honours paid them by Antiquity. Then they could afford them three or four sonorous names, and at full length; as to Ovid, the addition of Publius Naso Sulmensis; to Seneca, that of Lucius Annæas Cordubensis; and the like. Now, says he,

Our modern Poets to that pass are driven,

Those names are curtail'd which they first had given ;
And, as we wish'd to have their memories drown'd,
We scarcely can afford them half their sound.
Greene, who had in both Academies ta'en
Degree of Master, yet could never gain

To be call'd more than Robin: who, had he
Profest ought save the Muse, served, and been free

The full title of this Play is " The Fair Maid of the Exchange, with the Humours of the Cripple of Fenchurch." The above Satire against some Dramatic Plagiarists of the time, is put into the mouth of the Cripple, who is an excellent fellow, and the Hero of the Comedy. Of his humour this extract is a sufficient specimen; but he is described (albeit a tradesman, yet wealthy withal) with heroic qualities of mind and body; the latter of which he evinces by rescuing his Mistress (the Fair Maid) from three robbers by the main force of one crutch lustily applied; and the former by his foregoing the advantages which this action gained him in her good opinion, and bestowing his wit and finesse in procuring for her a husband, in the person of his friend Golding, more worthy of her beauty, than he could conceive his own maimed and halting limbs to be. It would require some boldness in a dramatist now-a-days to exhibit such a Character; and some luck in finding a sufficient Actor, who would be willing to personate the infirmities, together with the virtues, of the Noble Cripple.

After a sev❜n years 'prenticeship, might have
(With credit too) gone Robert to his grave.
Marlowe, renown'd for his rare art and wit,
Could ne'er attain beyond the name of Kit;
Although his Hero and Leander did

Merit addition rather. Famous Kid

Was call'd but Tom. Tom Watson; though he wrote Able to make Apollo's self to dote

Upon his Muse; for all that he could strive,

Yet never could to his full name arrive.
Tom Nash (in his time of no small esteem)
Could not a second syllable redeem.

Excellent Beaumont, in the foremost rank
Of the rarest wits, was never more than Frank.
Mellifluous SHAKSPEARE, whose inchanting quill
Commanded mirth or passion, was but WILL;
And famous Jonson, though his learned pen
Be dipt in Castaly, is still but Ben.

Fletcher, and Webster, of that learned pack
None of the meanest, neither was but Jack;
Decker but Tom; nor May, nor Middleton;
And he's now but Jack Ford, that once were John.

[Possibly our Poet was a little sore, that this contemptuous curtailment of their Baptismal Names was chiefly exercised upon his Poetical Brethren of the Drama. We hear nothing about Sam Daniel, or Ned Spenser, in his catalogue. The familiarity of common discourse might probably take the greater liberties with the Dramatic Poets, as conceiving of them as more upon a level with the Stage Actors. Or did their greater publicity, and popularity in consequence, fasten these diminutives upon them out of a feeling of love and kindness, as we say Harry the Fifth, rather that Henry, when we would express good-will?—as himself says, in those reviving words put into his mouth by Shakspeare, where he would comfort and confirm his doubting brothers :

Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,

But Harry, Harry!

:

And doubtless Heywood had an indistinct conception of this