l verse of very
little value, and on dramatic composition of still less. As it is, we owe
to him the knowledge of the not unimportant fact that Massinger was a
collaborator of Fletcher. His own plays are distinctly of the lower class,
though not quite valueless. _The Obstinate Lady_ is an echo of Fletcher and
Massinger; _Trappolin Creduto Principe_, an adaptation of an Italian farce,
is a good deal better, and is said, with various stage alterations, to have
held the boards till within the present century under the title of _A Duke
and no Duke_, or _The Duke and the Devil_. It is in fact a not unskilful
working up of some well-tried theatrical motives, but has no great literary
merit. The tragedy of _Ovid_, a regular literary tragedy in careful if not
very powerful blank verse, is Cokain's most ambitious effort. Like his
other work it is clearly an "echo" in character.

A more interesting and characteristic example of the "decadence" is Henry
Glapthorne. When the enthusiasm excited by Lamb's specimens, Hazlitt's, and
Coleridge's lectures for the Elizabethan drama, was fresh, and everybody
was hunting for new examples of the style, Glapthorne had the doubtful luck
to be made the subject of a very laudatory article in the _Retrospective
Review_, and two of his plays were reprinted. He was not left in this
honourable but comparatively safe seclusion, and many years later, in 1874,
all his plays and poems as known were issued by themselves in Mr. Pearson's
valuable series of reprints. Since then Glapthorne has become something of
a butt; and Mr. Bullen, in conjecturally attributing to him a new play,
_The Lady Mother_, takes occasion to speak rather unkindly of him. As usual
it is a case of _ni cet exces d'honneur ni cette indignite_. Personally,
Glapthorne has some of the interest that attaches to the unknown. Between
1639 and 1643, or for the brief space of four years, it is clear that he
was a busy man of letters. He published five plays (six if we admit _The
Lady Mother_), which had some vogue, and survived as an acted poet into the
Restoration period; he produced a small but not despicable collection of
poems of his own; he edited those of his friend Thomas Beedome; he was
himself a friend of Cotton and of Lovelace. But of his antecedents and of
the life that followed this short period of literary activity we know
absolutely nothing. The guess that he was at St. Paul's School is a mere
guess; and in the utter and total a