ridiculous, and as contemptible as possible ;" and they also put human nature into very laughable situations. Middleton, whose birth Mr Dyce fixes at a date not earlier than 1570, began like Marston as a satirist, publishing 'Microcynicon,'"six snarling satires," in couplets, in 1599; and followed up this with a prose satire, called the 'Black Book,' in 1604. But he achieved no great success in this fashionable and artificial line of composition: his rhymed satire is inferior to Marston's or Donne's, and his prose very inferior to Dekker's 'Seven Deadly Sins of London.' These performances, however, sufficiently show the character of the man-his broad, clever, unsentimental humour, and shrewd common-sense.

Middleton was formally conjoined with Dekker in the composition of "The Honest Whore," though his share is not conspicuous; and he would seem in his earliest work to have looked up to Dekker as a friend and master. His Simon the Tanner, the "Mayor of Quinborough," is an imitation of Dekker's Simon Eyre the shoemaker, Mayor of London. But the romantic and tragic element in that play is very coarse compared with the serious side of Dekker's plays; and Middleton found a more congenial field in the unmixed comedy of Jonson and Chapman. "A Trick to Catch the Old One," and "A Mad World, my Masters," were apparently written at the instigation of Chapman's "All Fools," the great exemplar and archetype of the English comedy of "gulling." In this type of comedy Middleton is exceedingly happy, and surpasses his masters in ingenuity of construction, and easy accumulation of mirthful circumstances. The fun begins early, and goes on to the end with accelerating speed. He excels particularly in making his gulls accessory to their own deception, and in putting into their mouths statements that have, to those in the secret, a meaning very much beyond what they intend. From the preface to "The Roaring Girl"—which was written in conjunction with Dekker, and bears marks of his hand in the shopping and gallanting scenes, if not also in the character ascribed to Moll, and some of the speeches

put into her mouth-we learn that Middleton prided himself on the construction of his comedies. There is an alteration, he says, now in the fashion of play-making: 'your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean purpose," have gone out of fashion, and neater inventions, with single plots and quaint conceits, have been set up. He professes also to be more decent than some of his predecessors, and has a gird apparently at Marston or Jonson, as some obscene fellow, who cares not what he writes against others, yet rips up the most nasty vice in his own plays, and presents it to a modest assembly. It is the excellency of a writer, says Middleton, to leave things better than he finds them. According to this principle, in the "Trick to Catch the Old One,"1 and the "Mad World," the courtesans are married and made honest women-the rakes are reclaimed ; and though no lesson is weightily inculcated, there is less indecency than in the works of more pretentious moralists.

Middleton's genius-and genius he did possess in no small measure—was essentially comical and unromantic. If Middleton "is admired for a certain wild and fantastic fancy, which delights in portraying scenes of witchcraft and supernatural agency," the admiration must come from people who have read only the witch-scenes in "The Witch," and have not quite appreciated even them. Middleton's witches, which Malone first held, and then did not hold, to have been created before Shakespeare's,2 exist more for comic

1 This play furnished the plot of Massinger's "New Way to Pay Old Debts." The titles of the plays, in fact, are interchangeable: both the scapegrace heroes extract by the same device rather more than their rights from usurious and grasping uncles. The character of Sir Giles has more force than any creation of Middleton's; but the germ of the character was probably taken from Middleton's "Pecunious Lucre," or Sir Alexander Wargrave in The Roaring Girl."

The chief resemblances are, that both poets introduce Hecate as the queen of the witches, and that the songs "Come away" and "Black Spirits," of which only the first words are given in "Macbeth," are set down in full in "The Witch." "The Witch" was not printed till 1778, when it was discovered in MS. by Mr Isaac Reed. If the songs were popular witch-songs, whether written before or after Shakespeare wrote "Macbeth," they may have been adopted in the stage copy of the play.

and spectacular purposes than as an integral part of a tragic conception. Familiarity breeds contempt: if they had been consulted only by the Duchess, with a view to the murder of her husband, they might have kept up an appearance of dignity and terror; but when the drunk Almachildes staggers in among them, upsets some of the beldams, and is received by Hecate as a favoured lover, we cease to have much respect for them, even though they do profess to exercise the terrible power of raising jars, jealousies, strifes, and heart-burning disagreements like a thick scarf o'er life. The visit of the fantastical gentleman whom Hecate has thrice enjoyed in incubus, is a very happy inspiration in the same vein as Tam o' Shanter's admiration of the heroine of Alloway Kirk: the scene is a fine opportunity for a comic actor; but it is damaging to the respectability of the dread Hecate. The tragedy of "Women Beware Women," the last act of which makes a quick despatch of all the chief actors after the model of the Spanish Tragedy, is sadly wanting in dignity of character. The characters are all so vile that the pity and terror produced by their death is almost wholly physical. Tragedy, as I have said, was not Middleton's forte.

VI. JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625).

It is not without compunction that one ventures to dissolve the long-established union between the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to characterise the second and principal member by himself. The rigour of my plan demands it. There are ample materials for forming an estimate of Fletcher, because he wrote, plays unassisted probably before, and certainly after, his partnership with Beaumont; while in groping after the character of Beaumont we must trust chiefly to imperfect materials—a masque, a few poems, vague traditions, and arbitrary recognition of portions of his joint work with Fletcher. If there had been marked differences between the plays written by Fletcher alone, and those written by him in conjunction with Beau

mont, one might have proceeded with some confidence to allocate their respective shares in the joint compositions. But I must confess for myself that there is no passage in any of the joint plays that I could affirm with any confidence not to be Fletcher's-not to contain traces of his hand. Of the three plays in which it is known for certain that Beaumont took part-the "Maid's Tragedy," "Philaster," and "A King and No King "—all have the same complexion as Fletcher's single compositions, similar characters, similar sentiments, and similar impelling forces. One would expect the metre to be a good criterion of separate identity. The abundance of feminine endings in Fletcher's undoubted verse, and his habit of running one line into another, have been suggested as tests; but the application of these tests is rendered uncertain by the fact that they do not apply to Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess." We cannot pick out certain passages as being Beaumont's, simply on the ground that they contain a smaller proportion of feminine endings than certain other passages which may be supposed to be Fletcher's. On the whole, I see no reason to doubt the opinion current during the reign of Charles I., and communicated by Bishop Earle to Aubrey, that Beaumont's chief share in the plays lay in correcting the exuberance of Fletcher. Almost all the commendatory poems prefixed to the edition of 1647-poems by Denham, Waller, Lovelace, Herrick, Lowell, Cartwright, Richard Brome, &c.—are addressed to Fletcher alone. Richard Brome, Jonson's servant and pupil, who knew Fletcher intimately, and was as likely as any man to be aware of the exact relationship between the two dramatists, gives all the glory to Fletcher. The truth probably is, that Beaumont applied his superior judgment to the task of amending Fletcher's first drafts, seeing that his prolific partner was strongly adverse to the labour of correction. I cannot say that there is any one scene in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher which I should feel warranted in assigning to Beaumont alone, although it is quite possible that he contributed whole Scenes, if not whole Acts.

All the dramatists hitherto considered in our survey agree in being men of humble extraction, who had to fight their way in the world through manifold difficulties. Fletcher is only partly an exception to this agreement. He was the son of a Kentish clergyman, who rose to the rank of bishop; but his father died in 1596, when he was seventeen years old, and left a widow and a large family in distressed circumstances. Five years before his father's death, Fletcher had entered Bennet College, Cambridge, and he was resident there in 1593. No other particulars of his private life have been ascertained. He seems to have begun to write for the stage about 1606, the supposed date of his "WomanHater;" and before he was cut off by the plague in 1625, he had written or co-operated in writing no less than sixty plays.

Fletcher entered the dramatic field when the rivalry of wit was at its hottest. He belonged to the lighter build of combatants-the saucy bark, rather than the imperious, proud, full sail. It is significant of his personal appearance that his portraits were considered failures: there was no catching the quick play of his vivacious features. His first dramatic effort-if the "Woman-Hater" is so-was in the mock-heroic vein, and gave proof of a comic genius second only to Shakespeare's. There are two comic heroes in the play-Gondarino, a ridiculously ill-conditioned and techy hater of women; and Lazarillo, a fanatic and insatiable gourmand. Gondarino's sourness takes the fancy of a mischief-loving young lady, Oriana, who amuses herself and gives rise to some most ludicrous scenes by making violent love to the old porcupine, very much to his disgust. In the pursuit of her whim, however, she compromises herself by equivocal behaviour, and narrowly escapes falling a victim to the cynic's ludicrously diabolical project of revenge. Alongside this series of incidents, and partly interwoven with them, runs the mock-heroic passion of Lazarillo, whose sole aim in life is to get possession of dainty food without paying for it. His goddess is Plenty, and his daily prayer to her is, "Fill me this day with some rare delicates." A