s promised those
of W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easy
talent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy.
_Microcosmus_ (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality,
and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. _The Bride_, _Covent
Garden_, _Tottenham Court_, range with the already characterised work of
Brome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interesting
history of _King John and Matilda_, as well as the lively comedy of _The
City Nightcap_, together with other work, deserved, and have now received,
collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probably
to be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, he
collaborated with Middleton, with Massinger, with Webster, with Fletcher,
with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It would
appear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which he
brought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-life
humours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together with
not a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect.
But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as _A New Wonder_,
_a Woman Never Vexed_, and _A Match at Midnight_, he shows not merely this
same _vis comica_ and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramatic
situations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty of
knitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with a
half namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in his
chronicle play _When you see Me you know Me_, and his romantic drama of
_The Noble Spanish Soldier_, has distinctly outstripped the ordinary
dramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had a
home in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of
"Dramatists of the Restoration," though his dramatic fame was obtained many
years before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of _Cupid
and Psyche_, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which the
best known is _The Antiquary_, are fair but not excessively favourable
samples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy,
which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from,
either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy.

Among the single plays comparatively f