: and had riches, power, understanding, and
length of days, with her for a dowry.

[Footnote 1: Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.]

[Footnote 2: Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.]

_Faithful Shepherdess_.--If all the parts of this delightful pastoral
had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric
intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the
Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have
made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander.
But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation
could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such
an ugly deformity as Chloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Chloe was
meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that
such weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS DECKER.

_The Virgin Martyr_.--This play has some beauties of so very high an
order, that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had
poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate
Decker who wrote Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for anything. The
very impurities which obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of
this play, like Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of
contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which are beyond
Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to
Miranda.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS MIDDLETON.--WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_Old Law_.--There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making
one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness
in the circumstances of this sweet tragicomedy, which are unlike
anything in the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of
a subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of
them finer geniuses than their associate.

* * * * *

JAMES SHIRLEY

Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for
any transcendent talent in himself, as 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. A new language, and quite a
new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.

* * * * *

SPECIME