e the King as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his
surroundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are presented with a comic and
cordial fidelity which the painter of Falstaff's "villeggiatura," the
creator of Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and conceivably have
approved. It is rather in the more serious or ambitious parts that we
find now and then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of manner. The
recurrent burden of a jingling couplet in the cajoleries of the
procuress Mrs. Blague is a survival from the most primitive and
conventional form of dramatic writing not yet thoroughly superseded and
suppressed by the successive influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and
of Jonson; while the treatment of character in such scenes as that
between Clarence, Richard, and Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for
a rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and simple part of Ayre, a
character worthy to have been glorified by the mention and commendation
of Heywood's most devoted and most illustrious admirer, is typical of
the qualities which Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the
representative characters of his favorite playwright.

In that prodigious monument of learning and labor, Mr. Fleay's
_Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama_, the common attribution of
these two plays to Heywood is impeached on the aesthetic score that
"they are far better than his other early work." I have carefully
endeavored to do what justice might be done to their modest allowance of
moderate merit; but whether they be Heywood's or--as Mr. Fleay, on
apparent grounds of documentary evidence, would suggest--the work of
Chettle and Day, I am certainly rather inclined to agree with the
general verdict of previous criticism, which would hardly admit their
equality and would decidedly question their claim to anything more than
equality of merit with the least admirable or memorable of Heywood's
other plays. Even the rough-hewn chronicle, "If you know not me you know
nobody," by which "the troubles of Queen Elizabeth" before her accession
are as nakedly and simply set forth in the first part as in the second
are "the building of the Royal Exchange" and "the famous victory" over
the Invincible Armada, has on the whole more life and spirit, more
interest and movement, in action as in style. The class of play to which
it belongs is historically the most curious if poetically the least
precious of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood in earnest or b