ly honour), finely but perhaps a little tediously argued. The
comic scenes, however, which are probably Rowley's, are in his best vein of
bustling swagger.

I have said that Middleton, as it seems to me, has not been fully
estimated. It is fortunately impossible to say the same of Webster, and the
reasons of the difference are instructive. Middleton's great fault is that
he never took trouble enough about his work. A little trouble would have
made _The Changeling_ or _Women Beware Women_, or even _The Spanish Gipsy_,
worthy to rank with all but Shakespere's very masterpieces. Webster also
was a collaborator, apparently an industrious one; but he never seems to
have taken his work lightly. He had, moreover, that incommunicable gift of
the highest poetry in scattered phrases which, as far as we can see,
Middleton had not. Next to nothing is known of him. He may have been parish
clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn; but the authority is very late, and the
commentators seemed to have jumped at it to explain Webster's fancy for
details of death and burial--a cause and effect not sufficiently
proportioned. Mr. Dyce has spent much trouble in proving that he could not
have been the author of some Puritan tracts published a full generation
after the date of his masterpieces. Heywood tells us that he was generally
called "Jack," a not uncommon thing when men are christened John. He
himself has left us a few very sententiously worded prefaces which do not
argue great critical taste. We know from the usual sources (Henslowe's
Diaries) that he was a working furnisher of plays, and from many rather
dubious title-pages we suppose or know some of the plays he worked at.
_Northward Ho! Westward Ho!_ and _Sir John Wyatt_ are pieces of dramatic
journalism in which he seems to have helped Dekker. He adapted, with
additions, Marston's _Malcontent_, which is, in a crude way, very much in
his own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) some
charming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recent
editor) to _A Cure for a Cuckold_, one of Rowley's characteristic and not
ungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and some
miscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and his
fame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or even
hinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the first
order of interest, if not invariably of the first order o