The rest appeared in the following order :-The Bondmar and The Duke of Milan in 1623; The Parliament of Love and The Renegado in 1624; The Roman Actor in 1626; The Great Duke of Florence in 1627; The Picture in 1629; Believe as you List and The Emperor of the East in 1631; The Maid of Honour, The Fatal Dowry, and The City Madam in 1632; The Guardian and A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1633; A Very Woman in 1634; The Bashful Lover in 1636. It will be seen, therefore, that all Massinger's work that has come down to us was produced either in the closing years of the reign of James I. or under Charles I. Many of his plays are preceded by dedications, addressed, in a modest but not a servile tone, to different patrons, prominent among whom is Philip, fourth Earl of Pembroke, to whose family Massinger warmly acknowledges his obligations. These dedications show that the poet valued his plays as works of literary art, unlike Fletcher, who seems to have been careless of any judgment beyond that of the spectators in the theatre. He died on March 17, 1640. His body, which was followed to the grave by many actors-he himself having been a member of the profession-was buried, like that of his friend Fletcher, in St. Saviour's, Southwark, where a window has recently been erected to his memory. The position of Massinger in the history of the English romantic drama is unique and remarkable. He has characteristics in common with dramatists differing so widely from each other as Shakespeare, Fletcher and Jonson; but the net result of his genius is something peculiar to himself. He resembles Shakespeare in the skill with which he develops the action of his plays; but, unlike him, he almost always contrives his own plots. In this respect he follows the practice of Fletcher, from whom, however, he differs radically in the character of his dramatic design. Fletcher, like the Spanish playwrights, makes his actions intentionally intricate, and keeps up the interest by rapid and brilliant dialogue; Massinger's plots are clear, simple and intelligible, and his diction is evidently formed with a view to stately and harmonious effect. Among all the great poets of the period he is most in sympathy with Jonson; but while the latter confines the range of his moral observation to contemporary manners, Massinger transports the imagination of his hearers into the larger regions of romance. The most striking feature in the genius of Massinger is his deliberate revival, on the very eve of the extinction of the poetic drama, of the spirit of the old Morality, out of which the forms of English tragedy and tragi-comedy originally sprang. Every one of his plays has, as its initial motive, a fixed moral idea or situation, which determines the course of the action, the grouping of the characters, and even the style of the sentiment and diction. In a large number of them the moral is set prominently forward at the conclusion: the following, for instance, are all closing lines: May we make use of This great example, and learn from it that To punish murder and unlawful love. -The Unnatural Combat. We'll give him funeral, And then determine of the State affairs: And learn from this example, There's no trust In a foundation that is built on lust.-The Duke of Milan. Take up his body: he in death hath paid For all his cruelties. Here's the difference: And such as governed only by their will, No good man's tear shed at their funeral. May she stand To all posterity a fair example For noble maids to imitate. -The Roman Actor. Since to live In wealth and pleasure's common, but to part with Though well begun, till it be fully ended. So all ends in peace now, And to all married men be this a caution, Which they should duly tender as their life, Neither to dote too much, nor doubt a wife.—The Picture. My grace on all, which, as I lend to you, Return your vows to heaven, that it may please, As it is gracious, to quench in me All future sparks of burning jealousy. -The Emperor of the East. By this sad precedent how just soever Our reasons are to remedy our wrongs; We are yet to leave them to their will and power That to that purpose have authority.—The Fatal Dowry. Your promised reformation, and instruct Our city dames, whom wealth makes proud, to move In their own spheres; and willingly to confess In their habits, manners and their highest post A distance twixt the city and the Court.-The City Madam. Not only was Massinger influenced by the spirit of the old Morality, but he seems, at the outset of his career, to have attempted to preserve its ancient forms. He trod the path followed by Dekker in Old Fortunatus and The Honest Whore; and indeed The Virgin Martyr, which he and Dekker produced together, shows, in many points, a stricter adherence to the lines of interludes like The Castle of Perseverance than either of these plays. The conflict between good and evil is represented in The Virgin Martyr by the struggle between the pagan Theophilus and the Christian Dorothea, of whom the former is sustained by Harpax, the Malus Angelus of the old Morality, and the latter by Angelo, the Bonus Angelus, who serves Dorothea in the garb of a page. As in The Castle of Perseverance, the powers of evil prevail almost to the end of the play; Dorothea is martyred, but the cause of good triumphs at the close, when her glorified spirit appears in company with Angelo; Harpax flies vanquished to Hell, and the dying Theophilus is converted to Christianity. It is scarcely to be doubted that the character of this play as a whole reflects the genius rather of Dekker than of Massinger, and that Massinger's main contribution to it is the elevation and harmony of its diction. Dekker's hand, and the tradition of the Morality, appear also in the low dialogue of Hircius and Spungius, in which, as in The Honest Whore, the manners of real life are imitated on principles familiar to the English stage from the days of Hick Scorner. The highest abstraction and the most disgusting particularity are, in these scenes, exhibited side by side, the intention of the dramatist being to exalt the idea of virtue by the sharpest possible contrast with the actual realities of vice. It was not so much the growing refinement of the spectators, making this kind of imitation distasteful, as an artistic perception in the poet of the rude structure of the Morality, that turned the genius of Massinger to the invention of new forms. In his later plays he abandoned completely the manner of Dekker, and worked out his moral conception by making the plot the vehicle of poetical justice. Beaumont and Fletcher had learned to arrest the attention of the theatre by concealing the nature of the dénouement. But, anxious only for stage effects, they were content with the representation of rapid and varying incident, without directing the movement of the drama to a moral end. Hence their plays are generally faulty in the first essential of tragedy, unity of action. Massinger, on the contrary, made every detail in the action conform to the requirements of his moral. Choosing, as a rule, for the subject of his play the operation of some violent passion,-lust, avarice, or jealousy,—he exhibits, like Marlowe, its effects on one or two leading characters, which form the pivot of the plot. Round these are grouped subsidiary personages, who either help to swell the tide of evil, or, after the manner of the Greek chorus, point out to the victims of passion, as well as to the spectators, the necessary consequences of unlawful conduct. Eventually the course of the action is brought by ingenious contrivances to a point at which the powers of evil suffer defeat; if in tragedy, by the death of the guilty agents; if in tragi-comedy or comedy,-and Massinger's VOL. IV 2 A gayest comedy has in it an element of tragedy,—by the exposure of fools and knaves. Massinger, in his transition from the manner of Dekker, was far from attaining at a single bound to this method of artistic unity. The Unnatural Combat, which is evidently one of the earliest of his surviving tragedies, is a dramatic illustration of the text: "Then when lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." The character in which Massinger chooses to exhibit the truth of this doctrine is made the centre of the play. When old Malefort is first introduced, the interest of the spectators is awakened in him by his manifestation of a certain elevated and heroic cast of mind, and it is increased by the fury of the combat between him and his son, which gives its title to the play, and the cause of which is left for the moment unexplained. Nor does the poet reveal the source of the monstrous and mysterious passion for his own daughter to which Malefort is subject, or of the equally horrible outrage which his daughter suffers from Montreville, his pretended friend; it is only at the close of the play that these are seen to be the judgments of Heaven on him, in consequence of the unrestrained passions of his youth, which have led him to poison his first wife, mother of his son, thus preparing the way for a second marriage with the mistress of Montreville, who becomes the mother of his daughter Theocrine. Though it be granted that Malefort's various punishments are the just retribution of his vicious selfishness, it cannot be considered that the mechanical explanation of them, furnished at the end of the play, is sufficient to weld into unity actions so apparently disconnected. On the other hand, in The Duke of Milan, The Picture, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, The Fatal Dowry, and The Maid of Honour, Massinger's artful enforcement of the moral, by means of the plot, is exhibited in its highest perfection. The first-named of these plays may be taken as an example of the extreme care which he bestowed on the structure of his tragedies. The action represents the circumstances under which |