bsence of the least scrap of
biographical information about him, his editor has thought it worth while
to print in full some not unamusing but perfectly irrelevant documents
concerning the peccadillos of a certain _George_ Glapthorne of Whittlesea,
who was certainly a contemporary and perhaps a relation. Henry Glapthorne
as a writer is certainly not great, but he is as certainly not
contemptible. His tragedy of _Albertus Wallenstein_ is not merely
interesting as showing a reversion to the practice, almost dropped in his
time (perhaps owing to censorship difficulties), of handling contemporary
historical subjects, but contains passages of considerable poetical merit.
His _Argalus and Parthenia_, a dramatisation of part of the _Arcadia_,
caught the taste of his day, and, like the _Wallenstein_, is poetical if
not dramatic. The two comedies, _The Hollander_ and _Wit in a Constable_,
are of the school which has been so frequently described, and not of its
strongest, but at the same time not of its weakest specimens. _Love's
Privilege_, sometimes held his best play, is a rather flabby tragi-comedy
of the Fletcher-Shirley school. In short, Glapthorne, without being
positively good, is good enough to have made it surprising that he is not
better, if the explanation did not present itself pretty clearly. Though
evidently not an old man at the time of writing (he has been guessed,
probably enough, to have been a contemporary of Milton, and perhaps a
little older or a little younger), his work has the clear defects of age.
It is garrulous and given to self-repetition (so much so that one of Mr.
Bullen's reasons for attributing _The Lady Mother_ to Glapthorne is the
occurrence in it of passages almost literally repeated in his known work);
it testifies to a relish of, and a habituation to, the great school,
coupled with powers insufficient to emulate the work of the great school
itself; it is exactly in flavour and character the last _not_ sprightly
runnings of a generous liquor. There is nowhere in it the same absolute
flatness that occurs in the lesser men of the Restoration school, like the
Howards and Boyle; the ancient gust is still too strong for that. It does
not show the vulgarity which even Davenant (who as a dramatist was ten
years Glapthorne's senior) too often displays. But we feel in reading it
that the good wine has gone, that we have come to that which is worse.

I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often class