born 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 Traitor," a tragedy (perhaps Shirley's best); "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 Lady of Pleasure" (perhaps the best of Shirley's 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 difference; and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. In Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both in amount and in kind: he was not a great man in himself, but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was Massinger's; but he imitated much more closely, was much more completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most ambition to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds emphasised all that told most effectively on the playgoers of the period. We read Greene and Marlowe to know what the Elizabethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth; Shirley to know what it was in its declining but facile and still powerful old age.

There were many other able playmakers in the great dramatic period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Rowley, Thomas Randolph, and Thomas May, but no other that can be called great, either by originality or by imitation. None of them gave proof of the intellectual calibre even of Middleton, the least important figure whom I have attempted to characterise in this chapter.

True, Charles Lamb has called Thomas Heywood "a prose Shakespeare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubtless has a certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness in him; but if Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, have described good old Heywood more accurately by calling him a garrulous Longfellow.

One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go farther down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In studying the literature that led to the supreme efflorescence of the Elizabethan drama, one thinks no relic too humble to be worth discussing; but when so many large and powerful minds invite our companionship, and continue always to lay before us fresh points of interest and fresh matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn from them to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their doors and follow their footsteps.

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APPENDIX.

OUR PLEASANT WILLY.

THREE stanzas are often quoted from Thalia's complaint regarding the decay of the theatres in Spenser's "Tears of the Muses," and it has been elaborately argued that they refer to Shakespeare. The date of their publication is 1591.

"And he, the man whom Nature's self had made

To mock herself, and truth to imitate,

With kindly counter under mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.

Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility,

And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept,
Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry
Without regard or due decorum kept;
Each idle wit at will presumes to make,
And doth the learned's task upon him take.

But that same gentle spirit from whose pen
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,
Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw;
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,

Than so himself to mockery to sell."

I have stated some reasons (p. 345) for refusing to believe that these stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we may think them, can possibly have been applied to him in 1591. I believe that death is, in the first stanza, real and