obviously that is not what Lamb meant. Indeed when
one remembers that if Shakespere is anything, he is a poet, the phrase may
run the risk of receiving an under--not an over--valuation. It is evident,
however, to any one who reads Lamb's remarks in full and carefully--it is
still more evident to any one who without much caring what Lamb or any one
else has said, reads Heywood for himself--what he did mean. He was looking
only at one or two sides of the myriad-sided one, and he justly saw that
Heywood touched Shakespere on these sides, if only in an incomplete and
unpoetic manner. What Heywood has in common with Shakespere, though his
prosaic rather than poetic treatment brings it out in a much less brilliant
way, is his sympathy with ordinary and domestic character, his aversion
from the fantastic vices which many of his fellows were prone to attribute
to their characters, his humanity, his kindness. The reckless tragedy of
blood and massacre, the reckless comedy of revelry and intrigue, were
always repulsive to him, as far as we can judge from the comparatively
scanty remnant of the hundreds of plays in which he boasted that he had had
a hand, if not a chief hand. Besides these plays (he confesses to
authorship or collaboration in two hundred and twenty) he was a voluminous
writer in prose and verse, though I do not myself pretend to much knowledge
of his non-dramatic work. Its most interesting part would have been a
_Lives of the Poets_, which we know that he intended, and which could
hardly have failed to give much information about his famous
contemporaries. As it is, his most remarkable and best-known work, not
contained in one of his dramas, is the curious and constantly quoted
passage half complaining that all the chief dramatists of his day were
known by abbreviations of their names, but characteristically and
good-humouredly ending with the license--

"I hold he loves me best who calls me Tom."

We have unfortunately no knowledge which enables us to call him many names
except such as are derived from critical examination of his works. Little,
except that he is said to have been a Lincolnshire man and a Fellow of
Peterhouse, is known of his history. His masterpiece, _The Woman killed
with Kindness_ (in which a deceived husband, coming to the knowledge of his
shame, drives his rival to repentance, and his wife to repentance and
death, by his charity), is not wholly admirable. Shakespere would have
felt, more