only overtopped by Shakespere at his best. The humours
of the cobbler Mayor of Queenborough in the one case, of the lunatic asylum
and the courting of its keeper's wife in the other, are such very mean
things that they can scarcely be criticised. But the desperate love of
Vortiger for Rowena in _The Mayor_, and the villainous plots against his
chaste wife, Castiza, are real tragedy. Even these, however, fall far below
the terrible loves, if loves they are to be called, of Beatrice-Joanna, the
heroine of _The Changeling_, and her servant, instrument, and murderer, De
Flores. The plot of the tragic part of this play is intricate and not
wholly savoury. It is sufficient to say that Beatrice having enticed De
Flores to murder a lover whom she does not love, that so she may marry a
lover whom she does love, is suddenly met by the murderer's demand of her
honour as the price of his services. She submits, and afterwards has to
purchase fresh aid of murder from him by a continuance of her favours that
she may escape detection by her husband. Thus, roughly described, the theme
may look like the undigested horrors of _Lust's Dominion_, of _The
Insatiate Countess_, and of _The Revenger's Tragedy_. It is, however, poles
asunder from them. The girl, with her southern recklessness of anything but
her immediate desires, and her southern indifference to deceiving the very
man she loves, is sufficiently remarkable, as she stands out of the canvas.
But De Flores,--the broken gentleman, reduced to the position of a mere
dependant, the libertine whose want of personal comeliness increases his
mistress's contempt for him, the murderer double and treble dyed, as
audacious as he is treacherous, and as cool and ready as he is fiery in
passion,--is a study worthy to be classed at once with Iago, and inferior
only to Iago in their class. The several touches with which these two
characters and their situations are brought out are as Shakesperian as
their conception, and the whole of that part of the play in which they
figure is one of the most wonderful triumphs of English or of any drama.
Even the change of manners and a bold word or two here and there, may not
prevent me from giving the latter part of the central scene:--

_Beat._ "Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
Thy language is so bold and vicious,
I