to challenge, I will take but one brief extract for evidence:

Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
Upon a bashful rose.

Here for once even "that celestial thief" John Milton has impaired
rather than improved the effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed from an
earlier and inferior poet. His use of Middleton's exquisite image is not
quite so apt--so perfectly picturesque and harmonious--as the use to
which it was put by the inventor.

Nothing in the age of Shakespeare is so difficult for an Englishman of
our own age to realize as the temper, the intelligence, the serious and
refined elevation of an audience which was at once capable of enjoying
and applauding the roughest and coarsest kinds of pleasantly, the rudest
and crudest scenes of violence, and competent to appreciate the finest
and the highest reaches of poetry, the subtlest and the most sustained
allusions of ethical or political symbolism. The large and long
popularity of an exquisite dramatic or academic allegory such as
"Lingua," which would seem to appeal only to readers of exceptional
education, exceptional delicacy of perception, and exceptional quickness
of wit, is hardly more remarkable than the popular success of a play
requiring such keen constancy of attention, such vivid wakefulness and
promptitude of apprehension, as this even more serious than fantastic
work of Middleton's. The vulgarity and puerility of all modern attempts
at any comparable effect need not be cited to throw into relief the
essential finish, the impassioned intelligence, the high spiritual and
literary level, of these crowded and brilliant and vehement five acts.
Their extreme cleverness, their indefatigable ingenuity, would in any
case have been remarkable: but their fulness of active and poetic life
gives them an interest far deeper and higher and more permanent than the
mere sense of curiosity and wonder.

But if "A Game at Chess" is especially distinguished by its complete and
thorough harmony of execution and design, the lack of any such artistic
merit in another famous work of Middleton's is such as once more to
excite that irritating sense of inequality, irregularity, inconstancy of
genius and inconsequence of aim, which too often besets and bewilders
the student of our early dramatists. There is poetry enough in "The
Witch" to furnish forth a whole generation of p