We have the titles of thirty-seven plays, either entirely or partly of his composition. But eighteen of them are extant.* The best known are The Virgin Martyr (93), The Fatal Dowry, The Duke of Milan, The Bondman, The City Madam, and The New Way to Pay Old Debts. The last one named has occasional representation on the modern stage, and contains the famous character of Sir Giles Overreach.

The quality which distinguishes this noble writer is a singular power of delineating the sorrow of pure and lofty minds exposed to unmerited suffering, cast down but not humiliated by misfortune. Massinger had no aptitude for pleasantries; but a desire to please the mixed audiences of those days introduced such an amount of stupid buffoonery and loathsome indecency into his plays, that we are driven to the supposition of his having had recourse to other hands to supply this obnoxious matter. His style and versification are singularly sweet and noble. No writer of that day is so free from archaisms and obscurities; and perhaps there is none in whom more constantly appear all the force, harmony, and dignity of which the English language is susceptible. To characterize Massinger in one sentence, we may say that dignity, tenderness, and grace, are the qualities in which he excels. At the close of a life of poverty he died in obscurity, and in the notice of his death the parish register names him "Philip Massinger a stranger."

To John Ford (1586-1639) the passion of unhappy love has furnished almost exclusively the subject-matter of his plays. He was a lawyer, who found time to use a poetic pen while carrying on the work of his profession. He began his dramatic career by joining with Dekker in the production of the touching tragedy of the Witch of Edmonton, in which popular superstitions are skilfully combined with a pathetic story of love and treachery. The works attributed to him are not numerous. Besides the above piece he wrote the tragedies of the Brother and Sister, the Broken Heart (beyond al!

* "The English drama never suffered a greater loss (for all Shakespeare's pieces have descended to us) than in the havoc which time and negligence have committed among the works of Massinger; for of thirty-eight plays attributed to his pen, only eighteen have been preserved."-Drake's Shakespeare and his Times.

"Eleven of them in manuscript were in possession of a Mr. Warburton, whose cook, desirous of saving what she considered better paper, used them in the kindling of fires and the basting of turkeys, and would doubtless have treated the manu script of the Faery Queene and the Novum Organum in the same way, had Providence seen fit to commit them to her master's custody."-Whipple's Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

comparison his most powerful work), a graceful historical drama on the subject of Perkin Warbeck, and the following romantic or tragi-comic pieces: the Lover's Melancholy (94), Love's Sacrifice, Fancies Chaste and Noble, and the Lady's Trial. His personal character, if we may judge from slight allusions found in contemporary writings, was sombre and retiring; and in his works pensive tenderness and pathos are carried to a higher pitch than in any other dramatist. His lyre has few tones; but his music makes up in intensity for what it wants in variety. We can hardly understand how any audience could ever have borne the harrowing up of their sensibilities by such repeated strokes of pathos. His verse and dialogue are somewhat monotonous in their sweet and plaintive melody, and are marked by a great richness of classical allusion.

But perhaps the most powerful and original genius among the Shakespearean dramatists of the second order is John Webster. He is as terrific as Ford is pathetic. His literary physiognomy has something of that dark, bitter, and woful expression which thrills us in the portraits of Dante. The number of his known works is very small; the most celebrated among them is the tragedy of the Duchess of Malfy (95); but others are not inferior to that strange piece in intensity of feeling and savage grimness of plot and treatment. Besides the above, we have The Devil's Law-Case, Guise, or the Massacre of France, in which the St. Bartholomew is, of course, the main action; the White Devil, founded on the crimes and sufferings of Vittoria Corombona; Appius and Virginia. We thus see that he worked by preference on themes which offered a congenial field for his portrayal of the darker passions and of the moral tortures of their victims. As Charles Lamb says, "To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit; this only a Webster can do." Like many of his contemporaries, he knew the secret of expressing the deepest emotion through the most familiar images; and the dirges and funeral songs which he has frequently introduced into his pieces, have that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates."

As we pass on to the lower grades of dramatic talent, we are

almost bewildered by the number and variety of manifestations. A few writers, however, deserve a distinct notice:-Thomas Dekker was one of the most prolific of these. Although he generally appears as a fellow-laborer with other dramatists, yet in the few pieces attributed to his unassisted pen, he shows great elegance of language and deep tenderness of sentiment. Thomas Middleton, best known as the author of The Witch, is admired for a certain wild and fantastic fancy which delights in portraying scenes of supernatural agency. John Marston is distinguished mainly by a lofty and satiric tone of invective, in which he lashes the vices and follies of mankind. Thomas Heywood exhibits a graceful fancy, and one of his plays, A Woman Killed with Kindness, is among the most touching of the period.

The dramatic era of Elizabeth and James closes with James Shirley (1594-1666), whose comedies, though in many respects bearing the same general character as the works of his great predecessors, still seem the earnest of a new period (96). He excels in the delineation of gay and fashionable society; and his dramas are more laudable for ease, grace, and animation, than for profound analysis of human nature, or for vivid portraiture of character. But the glory of the English drama had almost departed; and its extinction by external violence in 1642 but precipitated what was inevitable. The breaking out of the Civil War in that year closed the theatres; and this suspension of the dramatic profession was made perpetual by an ordinance of the Commons in 1648. From that date until the Restoration, all theatrical performances were illegal; but with the connivance of Cromwell, Davenant gave dramatic entertainments at Rutland House; and upon the great Protector's death in 1658, he ventured to re-open a public theatre in Drury Lane. With this event began an entirely new chapter in the history of the English stage.

The Elizabethan drama is the most wonderful and majestic outburst of genius that any age has yet seen. It is characterized by marked peculiarities; an intense richness and fertility of imagination, combined with the greatest force and vigor of familiar expression; an intimate union of the common and the refined; the boldest flights of fancy and the most scrupulous fidelity to actual reality. The great object of these dramatists being to produce

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intense impressions upon a miscellaneous audience, they sacrificed everything to strength and nature. Their writings reflect not only faithful images of human character and passion under every conceivable condition, not only the strongest as well as the most delicate coloring of fancy and imagination, but also the profoundest and simplest precepts derived from the practical experience of life.

For brief discussions of authors named in this chapter, see Hazlitt's Works, Vol. III., Coleridge's Works, Vol. IV., Lamb's Works, Vol. IV., Hallam's Literature of Europe, Vol. III.

CHAPTER XI.

THE PROSE LITERATURE OF THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.

THE object of the present chapter is to trace the nature and the results of that revolution in philosophy brought about by the writings of Bacon; and at the same time to give a general view of the prose literature of the Elizabethan era. As Bacon was the grandest thinker of that age who wrote in prose, he must be the principal figure of the chapter; and other authors of inferior merit must be but briefly mentioned.

Much of the peculiarly practical tendency of the political and philosophical literature of our own time can be traced to its beginning in the Elizabethan era, when, as a result of the Reformation, education first found many devotees among English laymen, and prose literature, for the first time, was generally used for other than ecclesiastical purposes. The clergy had no longer the monopoly of that learning and of those acquirements which, during preceding centuries, had given them the monopoly of power. Laymen were wielding the pen. It must be admitted that the prose of that era makes but a poor figure when compared with the splendor of the Elizabethan poetry; and that it is, indeed, redeemed from almost utter insignificance by the few English writings of Francis Bacon, a man who gained his chief glories from works that were written in the Latin language.

In the humble department of historical chronicles, John Stow, before the end of the sixteenth century, published his Summary of English Chronicles, Annals and A Survey of London; and Raphael Holinshed, who died in 1580, had written the pages from which Shakespeare drew the material for some of his half-legendary, halfhistorical dramas, and for the majority of his purely historical plays.