y the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young
butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective humor with
the story of Fitsgrave--a "thrice worthy" gentleman who under the
disguise of a young gull fresh from college succeeds in circumventing
and unmasking the five associated swindlers of variously villanous
professions by whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered and
befooled. The play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full
of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous event.

The first of Middleton's plays to attract notice from students of a
later generation, "A Mad World, My Masters," if not quite so thoroughly
good a comedy as "A Trick to Catch the Old One," must be allowed to
contain the very best comic character ever drawn or sketched by the
fertile and flowing pen of its author. The prodigal grandfather, Sir
Bounteous Progress, is perhaps the most life-like figure of a
good-humored and liberal old libertine that ever amused or scandalized
a tolerant or intolerant reader. The chief incidents of the action are
admirably humorous and ingenious; but the matrimonial part of the
catastrophe is something more than repulsive, and the singular
intervention of a real live succubus, less terrible in her seductions
than her sister of the "Contes Drolatiques," can hardly seem happy or
seasonable to a generation which knows not King James and his
Demonology.

Of the two poets occasionally associated with Middleton in the
composition of a play, Dekker seems usually to have taken in hand the
greater part, and Rowley the lesser part, of the composite poem
engendered by their joint efforts. The style of "The Roaring Girl" is
full of Dekker's peculiar mannerisms; slipshod and straggling metre,
incongruous touches or flashes of fanciful or lyrical expression,
reckless and awkward inversions, irrational and irrepressible outbreaks
of irregular and fitful rhyme. And with all these faults it is more
unmistakably the style of a born poet than is the usual style of
Middleton. Dekker would have taken a high place among the finest if not
among the greatest of English poets if he had but had the sense of
form--the instinct of composition. Whether it was modesty, indolence,
indifference, or incompetence, some drawback or shortcoming there was
which so far impaired the quality of his strong and delicate genius that
it is impossible for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say or think
of h