ssible opportunity to the appetite of both for horrors.
Once he, Rowley, and Dekker combined to produce the strange masterpiece
(for a masterpiece it is in its own undisciplined way) of the _Witch of
Edmonton_, where the obvious signs of a play hastily cobbled up to meet a
popular demand do not obscure the talents of the cobblers. It must be
confessed that there is much less of Ford than of Rowley and Dekker in the
piece, except perhaps its comparative regularity and the quite unreasonable
and unintelligible bloodiness of the murder of Susan. In _The Sun's
Darling_, due to Ford and Dekker, the numerous and charming lyrics are
pretty certainly Dekker's; though we could pronounce on this point with
more confidence if we had the two lost plays, _The Fairy Knight_ and _The
Bristowe Merchant_, in which the same collaborators are known to have been
engaged. _The Fancies_, _Chaste and Noble_, and _The Lady's Trial_ which we
have, and which are known to be Ford's only, are but third-rate work by
common consent, and _Love's Sacrifice_ has excited still stronger opinions
of condemnation from persons favourable to Ford. This leaves us practically
four plays upon which to base our estimate--_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, _The
Lover's Melancholy_, _The Broken Heart_, and _Perkin Warbeck_. The
last-named I shall take the liberty of dismissing summarily with the same
borrowed description as Webster's _Appius and Virginia_. Hartley Coleridge,
perhaps willing to make up if he could for a general distaste for Ford,
volunteered the strange judgment that it is the best specimen of the
historic drama to be found out of Shakespere; and Hazlitt says nothing
savage about it. I shall say nothing more, savage or otherwise. _The
Lover's Melancholy_ has been to almost all its critics a kind of lute-case
for the very pretty version of Strada's fancy about the nightingale, which
Crashaw did better; otherwise it is naught. We are, therefore, left with
_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_ and _The Broken Heart_. For myself, in respect to
the first, after repeated readings and very careful weighings of what has
been said, I come back to my first opinion--to wit, that the Annabella and
Giovanni scenes, with all their perversity, all their availing themselves
of what Hazlitt, with his unerring instinct, called "unfair attractions,"
are among the very best things of their kind. Of what may be thought unfair
in them I shall speak a little later: but allowing for this, the sh