when wounded, are among the best. The song "Come live with me and be my love," to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an answer, is Marlowe's. Heywood I shall mention next, as a direct contrast to Mar lowe in everything but the smoothness of his verse. As Mar. lowe's imagination glows like a furnace, Heywood's is a gentle, lambent flame, that purifies without consuming. His manner is simplicity itself. There is nothing supernatural, nothing startling, or terrific. He makes use of the commonest circumstances of every-day life, and of the easiest tempers, to show the workings, or rather the inefficacy of the passions, the vis inertiæ of tragedy. His incidents strike from their very familiarity, and the distresses he paints invite our sympathy from the calmness and resignation with which they are borne. The pathos might be deemed purer from its having no mixture of turbulence or vindictiveness in it; and in proportion as the sufferers are made to deserve a better fate. In the midst of the most untoward reverses and cutting injuries, good nature and good sense keep their accustomed sway. He describes men's errors with tenderness, and their duties only with zeal, and the heightenings of a poetic fancy. His style is equally natural, simple, and unconstrained. The dialogue (bating the verse) is such as might be uttered in ordinary conversation. It is beautiful prose put into heroic measure. It is not so much that he uses the common English idiom for everything (for that I think the most poetical and impassioned of our elder dramatists do equally), but the simplicity of the characters and the equable flow of the sentiments do not require or suffer it to be warped from the tone of level speaking, by figurative expressions, or hyperbolical allusions. A few scattered exceptions occur now and then, where the hectic flush of passion forces them from the lips, and they are not the worse for being rare. Thus, in the play called A Woman Killed with Kindness,' Wendoll, when reproached by Mrs. Frankford with his obligations to her husband, interrupts her hastily, by saying "Oh speak no more! For more than this I know, and have recorded And further on, Frankford, when doubting his wife's fidelity, says, with less feeling indeed, but with much elegance of fancy, "Cold drops of sweat sit dangling on my hairs, Like morning dew upon the golden flow'rs.” So also, when returning to his house at midnight to make the fatal discovery, he exclaims, "Astonishment, Fear, and amazement, beat upon my heart, It is the reality of things present to their imaginations that makes these writers so fine, so bold, and yet so true in what they describe. Nature lies open to them like a book, and was not to them "invisible, or dimly seen" through a veil of words and filmy abstractions. Such poetical ornaments are however to be met with at considerable intervals in this play, and do not disturb the calm serenity and domestic simplicity of the author's style. The conclusion of Wendoll's declaration of love to Mrs. Frankford may serve as an illustration of its general merits, both as to purity of thought and diction: "Fair, and of all beloved, I was not fearful And I am then undone. I care not, I; 'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me; The general name of villain through the world, Of traitor to my friend: I care not, I; Poverty, shame, death, scandal, and reproach, The affecting remonstrance of Frankford to his wife, and her repentant agony at parting with him, are already before the public, in Mr. Lamb's Specimens. The winding up of this play is rather awkwardly managed, and the moral is, according to established usage, equivocal. It required only Frankford's reconciliation to his wife, as well as his forgiveness of her, for the highest breach of matrimonial duty, to have made a 'Woman Killed with Kindness,' a complete anticipation of the 'Stranger.' Heywood, however, was in that respect but half a Kotzebue The view here given of country manners is truly edifying. As to the higher walk of tragedy, we see the manners and moral sentiments of kings and nobles of former times, here we have the feuds and amiable qualities of country 'squires and their relatives; and such as were the rulers, such were their subjects. The frequent quarrels and ferocious habits of private life are well exposed in the fatal rencounter between Sir Francis Acton and Sir Charles Mountford about a hawking match, in the ruin and rancorous persecution of the latter in consequence, and in the hard, unfeeling, cold-blooded treatment he receives in his distress from his own relations, and from a fellow of the name of Shafton. After reading the sketch of this last character, who is introduced as a mere ordinary personage, the representative of a class, without any preface or apology, no one can doubt the credibility of that of Sir Giles Overreach, who is professedly held up (I should think almost unjustly) as a prodigy of grasping and hardened selfishness. The influence of philosophy and prevalence of abstract reasoning, if it has done nothing for our poetry, has done, I should hope, something for our manners. The callous declaration of one of these unconscionable churls, "This is no world in which to pity men," might have been taken as a motto for the good old times in general, and with a very few reservations, if Heywood has not grossly libelled them.-Heywood's plots have little of artifice or regularity of design to recommend them. He writes on carelessly, as it happens, and trusts to Nature, and a certain happy tranquillity of spirit, for gaining the favour of the audience. He is said, besides attending to his duties as an actor, to have composed regularly a sheet a day. This may account in some measure for the unembarrassed facility of his style. His own account makes the number of his writings for the stage, or those in which he had a main hand, upwards of two hundred. In fact, I do not wonder at any quantity that an author is said to have written; for the more a man writes, the more he can write. The same remarks will apply, with certain modifications, to other remaining works of this writer, the Royal King and Loyal Subject,' 'A Challenge for Beauty,' and 'The English Traveller.' The barb of misfortune is sheathed in the mildness of the writer's temperament, and the story jogs on very comfortably, without effort or resistance, to the euthanasia of the catastrophe. In two of these the person principally aggrieved survives, and feels himself none the worse for it. The most splendid passage in Heywood's comedies is the account of Shipwreck by Drink, in The English Traveller,' which was the foundation of Cowley's Latin poem, Naufragium Joculare. The names of Middleton and Rowley, with which I shall conclude this Lecture, generally appear together as two writers who frequently combined their talents in the production of joint pieces. Middleton (judging from their separate works) was "the more potent spirit" of the two; but they were neither of them equal to some others. Rowley appears to have excelled in describing a certain amiable quietness of disposition and disinterested tone of morality, carried almost to a paradoxical excess, as in his 'Fair Quarrel,' and in the comedy of 'A Woman never Vexed,' which is written in many parts, with a pleasing simplicity and naiveté equal to the novelty of the conception. Middleton's style was not marked by any peculiar quality of his own, but was made up, in equal proportions, of the faults and excellences common to his contemporaries. In his 'Women beware Women,' there is a rich marrowy vein of internal sentiment, with fine occasional insight into human nature, and cool cutting irony of expression. He is lamentably deficient in the plot and denouement of the story. It is like the rough draught of a tragedy, with a number of fine things thrown in, and the best made use of first; but it tends to no fixed goal, and the interest decreases, instead of increasing as we read on, for want of previous arrangement and an eye to the whole. We have fine studies of heads, a piece of richly coloured drapery, "a foot, an hand, an eye from Nature drawn, that's worth a history;" but the groups are ill disposed, nor are the figures pro portioned to each other or the size of the canvas. The author's power is in the subject, not over it; or he is in possession of excellent materials, which he husbands very ill. This character, though it applies more particularly to Middleton, might be applied generally to the age. Shakspeare alone seemed to stand over his work, and to do what he pleased with it. He saw to the end of what he was about, and with the same faculty of lending himself to the impulses of Nature and the impression of the moment, never forgot that he himself had a task to perform, nor the place which each figure ought to occupy in his general design. The characters of Livia, of Brancha, of Leantio and his mother, in the play of which I am speaking, are all admirably drawn. The art and malice of Livia show equal want of principle and acquaintance with the world; and the scene in which she holds the mother in suspense, while she betrays the daughter into the power of the profligate duke, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The proneness of Brancha to tread the primrose path of pleasure, after she has made the first false step, and her sudden transition from unblemished virtue to the most abandoned vice, in which she is notably seconded by her mother-inlaw's ready submission to the temptations of wealth and power, form a true and striking picture. The first intimation of the intrigue that follows, is given in a way that is not a little remarkable for simplicity and acuteness. Brancha says, "Did not the duke look up? Methought he saw us." To which the more experienced mother answers, "That's every one's conceit that sees a duke; Is at his own intentions, and his object It turns out, however, that he had been looking at them, and not "at the public good." The moral of this tragedy is rendered more impressive from the manly, independent character of Leantio in the first instance, and the manner in which he dwells, in a sort of doting abstraction, on his own comforts, of being possessed |