enerous and enthusiastic estimate of the
Elizabethan period, Lamb has pronounced Ford to be of the first order of
poets. Mr Swinburne, while bringing not a few limitations to this
tremendous eulogy, has on the whole supported it in one of the most
brilliant of his prose essays; and critics as a rule have bowed to Lamb's
verdict. On the other hand, Hazlitt (who is "gey ill to differ with" when
there are, as here, no extra-literary considerations to reckon) has
traversed that verdict in one of the most damaging utterances of
commonsense, yet not commonplace, criticism anywhere to be found, asking
bluntly and pointedly whether the exceptionableness of the subject is not
what constitutes the merit of Ford's greatest play, pronouncing the famous
last scene of _The Broken Heart_ extravagant, and fixing on "a certain
perversity of spirit" in Ford generally. It is pretty clear that Hartley
Coleridge (who might be paralleled in our own day as a critic, who seldom
went wrong except through ignorance, though he had a sublime indifference
as to the ignorance that sometimes led him wrong) was of no different
opinion. It is not easy to settle such a quarrel. But I had the good
fortune to read Ford before I had read anything except Hartley Coleridge's
rather enigmatic verdict about him, and in the many years that have passed
since I have read him often again. The resulting opinion may not be
exceptionally valuable, but it has at least stood the test of frequent
re-reading of the original, and of reading of the main authorities among
the commentators.

John Ford, like Fletcher and Beaumont, but unlike almost all others of his
class, was a person not compelled by need to write tragedies,--comedies of
any comic merit he could never have written, were they his neck verse at
Hairibee. His father was a man of good family and position at Ilsington in
Devon. His mother was of the well-known west-country house of the Pophams.
He was born(?) two years before the Armada, and three years after
Massinger. He has no university record, but was a member of the Middle
Temple, and takes at least some pains to assure us that he never wrote for
money. Nevertheless, for the best part of thirty years he was a playwright,
and he is frequently found collaborating with Dekker, the neediest if
nearly the most gifted gutter-playwright of the time. Once he worked with
Webster in a play (_The Murder of the Son upon the Mother_) which must have
given the fullest po