defect or default in moral
taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of ethics, which may be
detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet's invention. A
man must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who cannot respond in
spirit to that bitter cry of chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the
shadow of a mother's shame:

Quench, my spirit,
And out with honor's naming lights within thee!
Be dark and dead to all respects of manhood!
I never shall have use of valor more.

Middleton has no second hero like Captain Ager: but where is there
another so thoroughly noble and lovable among all the characters of all
the dramatists of his time but Shakespeare?

The part taken by Rowley in this play is easy for any tiro in criticism
to verify. The rough and crude genius of that perverse and powerful
writer is not seen here by any means at its best. I should say that his
call was rather toward tragedy than toward comedy; that his mastery of
severe and serious emotion was more genuine and more natural than his
command of satirical or grotesque realism. The tragedy in which he has
grappled with the subject afterward so differently handled in the first
and greatest of Landor's tragedies is to me of far more interest and
value than such comedies as that which kindled the enthusiasm of a loyal
Londoner in the civic sympathies of Lamb. Disfigured as it is toward the
close by indulgence in mere horror and brutality after the fashion of
Andronicus or Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and pathos in its
best scenes than a reader of his comedies would have expected. But in
the underplot of "A Fair Quarrel" Rowley's besetting faults of
coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and
obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at
such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet
of finer if not of sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and
inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better
parts of "The Old Law." The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical
interludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and hastiest scenes of
Middleton's writing: while the sweet and noble dignity of the finer
passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on every line
and in every cadence. But for sheer bewildering incongruity there is no
play known to me which can be compared with "The Mayor of Queen