ear and easy flow, in
its absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are always
interesting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always more
or less attractive. It used to be fashionable to praise their "young men,"
probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with the
brutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy.
They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (let
it be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of
_Philaster_. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection of
Imogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But for
portraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid of
love-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed assertion of the mythologists
that jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted,
affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me to
Fletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence of
their comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than that
of _A King and no King_, of the _Humorous Lieutenant_, of _Rule a Wife and
have a Wife_), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, their
charming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonic
virtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good,
solid, pleasant, and plentiful substitutes for it.

It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many times
fifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. The
play which usually opens the series, _The Maid's Tragedy_, is perhaps the
finest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a little
improbable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked it
much; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchical
tone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place,
the authors' greatest dramatic weakness--a weakness common indeed to all
their tribe except Shakespere--the representation of sudden and quite
insufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault of
theirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtue
punished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. The
Aspatia of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and the Bellario of _Philaster_, pathetic
as they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pa