art of
the same field that it may seem overbold for any such subordinate to
express or to suggest a suspicion that this counsel would have been
rather the expression of a personal and a partly accidental sympathy
than the result of a critical and a purely rational consideration. And
yet I can hardly think it questionable that it must have been less the
poetic or essential merit than the casual or incidental associations of
Heywood's work which excited so exceptional an enthusiasm in so
excellent a judge. For as a matter of fact it must be admitted that in
one instance at least the objections of the carper Hazlitt are better
justified than the commendations of the finer and more appreciative
critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of
sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France
found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the
upper classes of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of
Heywood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords,
Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and noble characters are the
finest and surest witnesses to the noble and beautiful nature of their
designer's, observes that "Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen,
etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in
life." But such country gentlemen as his Actons and Mountfords are
surely of a worse than the worst kind; more cruel or more irrational,
more base or more perverse, than we need fear to see in life unless our
experience should be exceptionally unfortunate. Lamb indeed is rather
an advocate than a judge in the case of his fellow-Londoners Thomas
Heywood and William Rowley; but his pleading is better worth our
attention than the summing up of a less cordial or less competent
critic.

From critics or students who regard with an academic smile of cultivated
contempt the love for their country or the faith in its greatness which
distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and
Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the
ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet whose devotion to his
homestead was not merely that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner,
no less fond and proud of his city than of his country. The quaint,
homely, single-hearted municipal loyalty of an old-world burgess,
conscious of his station as "a citizen of no mean city," and proud even
of the