t beautiful, piece
entitled _Four Plays in One_, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gone
through that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit that
such a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences in
all its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names in
English literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and most
terrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont and
Fletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men;
for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear any
competition.

It has not been usual to put Thomas Middleton in the front rank among the
dramatists immediately second to Shakespere; but I have myself no
hesitation in doing so. If he is not such a poet as Webster, he is even a
better, and certainly a more versatile, dramatist; and if his plays are
inferior as plays to those of Fletcher and Massinger, he has a mastery of
the very highest tragedy, which neither of them could attain. Except the
best scenes of _The White Devil_, and _The Duchess of Malfi_, there is
nothing out of Shakespere that can match the best scenes of _The
Changeling_; while Middleton had a comic faculty, in which, to all
appearance, Webster was entirely lacking. A little more is known about
Middleton than about most of his fellows. He was the son of a gentleman,
and was pretty certainly born in London about 1570. It does not appear that
he was a university man, but he seems to have been at Gray's Inn. His
earliest known work was not dramatic, and was exceedingly bad. In 1597 he
published a verse paraphrase of the _Wisdom of Solomon_, which makes even
that admirable book unreadable; and if, as seems pretty certain, the
_Microcynicon_ of two years later is his, he is responsible for one of the
worst and feeblest exercises in the school--never a very strong one--of
Hall and Marston. Some prose tracts of the usual kind are not better; but
either at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, or in the very earliest
years of the next, Middleton turned his attention to the then all absorbing
drama, and for many years was (chiefly in collaboration) a busy playwright.
We have some score of plays which are either his alone, or in greatest part
his. The order of their composition is very uncertain, and as with most of
the dramatists of the period, not a few of them never appeared in print
till long after the author's death