urn the
affection of a worthy lover; but, when he fails, she must not condescend
again to love. That would be to admit that love was a necessity of her
life, not a special act of favour for some exceptional proofs of
worthiness. Given the general tone of sentiment, I confess that, to my
taste, Massinger's solution has the merit, not only of originality, but
of harmony. It may, of course, be held that a jilted lady should, in a
perfectly healthy state of society, have some other alternative besides
a convent or an unworthy marriage. Some people, for example, may hold
that she should be able to take to active life as a lawyer or a
professor of medicine; or they may hold that love ought not to hold so
prominent a part even in a woman's life that disappointed passion should
involve, as a necessary consequence, the entire abandonment of the
world. But, taking the romantic point of view, of which it is the very
essence to set an extravagant value upon love, and remembering that
Massinger had not heard of modern doctrines of woman's rights, one must
admit, I think, that he really shows, by the best means in his power, a
strong sense of the dignity of womanhood, and that his catastrophe is
more satisfactory than the violent death or the consignment to an
inferior lover which would have commended themselves to most Elizabethan
dramatists.

The same vein of chivalrous sentiment gives a fine tone to some of
Massinger's other plays; to the 'Bondman,' for example, and the 'Great
Duke of Florence,' in both of which the treatment of lover's devotion
shows a higher sense of the virtue of feminine dignity and purity than
is common in the contemporary stage. There is, of course, a want of
reality, an admission of extravagant motives, and an absence of dramatic
concentration, which indicate an absence of high imaginative power.
Chivalry, at its best, is not very reconcilable with common-sense; and
the ideal hero is divided, as Cervantes shows, by very narrow
distinctions from the downright madman. What was absurd in the more
vigorous manifestations of the spirit does not vanish when its energy is
lowered, and the rhetorician takes the place of the poet. But the
sentiment is still genuine, and often gives real dignity to Massinger's
eloquent speeches. It is true that, in apparent inconsistency with this
excellence, passages of Massinger are even more deeply stained than
usual with revolting impurities. Not only are his bad men and women ap