en the old Morality and the new Comedy--a
province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and
posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine
soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i.
scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii.
scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture
of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above
quoted. Milton's obligation to the latter passage is less direct than
his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton's from which he
transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in
"Lycidas": but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had
apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think[1]) left in the ear of the blind
old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of
the dramatist's address to "reverend and honorable matrimony."

[Footnote 1: Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he
lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun
Society that the real author of "A Game at Chess" was none other than
John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before
the publication of that anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less
curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the
same authority, that "Comus" was written by Sir John Suckling, "Paradise
Regained" by Lord Rochester, and "Samson Agonistes" by Elkanah Settle:
while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that
Milton--who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the
title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him--owed
his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact
that he was the real author of Dryden's "Astraea Redux."]

In "Michaelmas Term" the realism of Middleton's comic style is no
longer alloyed or flavored with poetry or fancy. It is an excellent
Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or
indignant humor. Its successor, "A Trick to Catch the Old One," is by
far the best play Middleton had yet written, and one of the best he ever
wrote. The merit of this and his other good comedies does not indeed
consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean
creation or Jonsonian invention of humors or of men: the spendthrifts
and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed