tion of
Virginia.

The scenes in which the tragic underplot of Rowley's tragedy is deftly
and effectively wound up are full of living action and passion; that
especially in which the revenge of a deserted wife is wreaked
mistakingly on the villanous minion to whose instigation she owes the
infidelity of the husband for whom she mistakes him. The gross physical
horrors which deform the close of a noble poem are relieved if not
beautified by the great style of its age--an age unparalleled in wealth
and variety of genius, a style unmatchable for its union of inspired and
imaginative dignity with actual and vivid reality of impassioned and
lofty life.

No comparison is possible, nor if possible could it be profitable,
between the somewhat rough-hewn English oak of Rowley's play and the
flawless Roman steel of Landor's great Miltonic tragedy on the same
subject. The fervent praise of Southey was not too generous to be just
in its estimate of that austere masterpiece; it is lamentable to
remember the injustice of its illustrious author to the men of
Shakespeare's day. I fear he would certainly not have excepted the noble
work of his precursor from his general condemnation or impreachment of
"their bloody bawdries"--a misjudgment gross enough for Hallam--or
Voltaire when declining to the level of a Hallam. Landor was as headlong
as these were hidebound, as fitful as they were futile; but not even the
dispraise or the disrelish of a finer if not of a greater dramatic poet
could affect the credit or impair the station of one on whose merits the
final sentence of appreciation has been irrevocably pronounced by the
verdict of Charles Lamb.

THOMAS HEYWOOD

If it is difficult to write at all on any subject once ennobled by the
notice of Charles Lamb without some apprehensive sense of intrusion and
presumption, least of all may we venture without fear of trespass upon
ground so consecrated by his peculiar devotion as the spacious if homely
province or demesne of the dramatist whose highest honor it is to have
earned from the finest of all critics the crowning tribute of a sympathy
which would have induced him to advise an intending editor or publisher
of the dramatists of the Shakespearean age to begin by a reissue of the
works of Heywood. The depth and width of his knowledge, the subtlety and
the sureness of his intuition, place him so far ahead of any other
critic or scholar who has ever done any stroke of work in any p