y
VI._ His spectacles and pageants, chiefly in honour of London (_London's
Jus Honorarium_, with other metaphorical Latin titles of the same
description) are heavy, the weakness of his versification being especially
felt in such pieces. His strength lies in the domestic and contemporary
drama, where his pathos had free play, unrestrained by the necessity of
trying to make it rise to chivalrous or heroic height, and where his keen
observation of his fellow-men made him true to mankind in general, at the
same time that he gave a vivid picture of contemporary manners. Of this
class of his plays _A Woman killed with Kindness_ is undoubtedly the chief,
but it has not a few companions, and those in a sufficiently wide and
varied class of subject. _The Fair Maid of the Exchange_ is, perhaps, not
now found to be so very delectable and full of mirth as it is asserted to
be on its title-page, because it is full of that improbability and neglect
of verisimilitude which has been noted as the curse of the minor
Elizabethan drama. The "Cripple of Fenchurch," the real hero of the piece,
is a very unlikely cripple; the heroines chop and change their affections
in the most surprising manner; and the characters generally indulge in that
curious self-description and soliloquising in dialogue which is never
found in Shakespere, and is found everywhere else. But it is still a lively
picture of contemporary manners. We should be sorry to lose _The Fair Maid
of the West_ with its picture of Devonshire sailors, foreign merchants,
kings of Fez, Bashaws of various parts, Italian dukes, and what not. The
two parts make anything but a good play, but they are decidedly
interesting, and their tone supports Mr. Bullen's conjecture that we owe to
Heywood the, in parts, admirable play of _Dick of Devonshire_, a
dramatisation of the quarter-staff feats in Spain of Richard Peake of
Tavistock. _The English Traveller_ may rank with _A Woman killed with
Kindness_ as Heywood's best plays (there is, indeed, a certain community of
subject between them), but _A Maidenhead well Lost_, and _The Witches of
Lancashire_, are not far behind it; nor is _A Challenge for Beauty_. We can
hardly say so much for _Love's Mistress_, which dramatises the story of
_Cupid and Psyche_, or for _The Wise Woman of Hogsdon_ (Hoxton), a play
rather of Middleton's type. But in _The Royal King and Loyal Subject_, and
in _Fortune by Land and Sea_, the author shows again the sympathy with