defects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldom
lags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he is
never heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined,--by
which I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations and
loose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; and
Middleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in striking
contrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poetical
morality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known.
He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; he
makes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together very
contentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like the
post-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of these
works of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusion
of a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost always
infuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once--in the charming
comedy of _The Spanish Gipsy_,--and the result there is so agreeable that
the reader only wishes he had done it oftener.

Usually, however, when his thoughts took a turn of less levity than in
these careless humorous studies of contemporary life, he devoted himself
not to the higher comedy, but to tragedy of a very serious class, and when
he did this an odd phenomenon generally manifested itself. In Middleton's
idea of tragedy, as in that of most of the playwrights, and probably all
the playgoers of his day, a comic underplot was a necessity; and, as we
have seen, he was himself undoubtedly able enough to furnish such a plot.
But either because he disliked mixing his tragic and comic veins, or for
some unknown reason, he seems usually to have called in on such occasions
the aid of Rowley, a vigorous writer of farce, who had sometimes been
joined with him even in his comic work. Now, not only was Rowley little
more than a farce writer, but he seems to have been either unable to make,
or quite careless of making, his farce connect itself in any tolerable
fashion with the tragedy of which it formed a nominal part. The result is
seen in its most perfect imperfection in the two plays of _The Mayor of
Queenborough_ and _The Changeling_, both named from their comic features,
and yet containing tragic scenes, the first of a very high order, the
second of an order