ventitious interest to his thinnest or homeliest
work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a
quality. In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it
informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not
with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and
comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play: which is
indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced
and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or
even an irregular historical drama. Again the trusty cockney poet has
made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman: and has made
of him at once a really noble and a heartily amusing figure. His
better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman
d'Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a
little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and
venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap;
though in the earlier passages of Parisian trickery and buffoonery there
is a note of broad humor which may remind us of Moliere--not of course
the Moliere of Tartuffe, but the Moliere of M. de Pourceaugnac. The
curious alterations made in later versions of the closing scene are
sometimes though not generally for the better.

Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared
that "posterity is bound to take care" (an obligation, I fear, of a kind
which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) "that a writer
loses nothing by such a noble modesty" as that which induced Heywood to
set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in
the rascally interest of those "harlotry players" who thought it,
forsooth, "against their peculiar profit to have them come in print."
But I am not sure that it was altogether a noble or at all a rational
modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt: "It never was any
great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read." For, eight
years after this well-known passage was in print, when publishing a
"Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable passages of
this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King
Charles," he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, "an
apologie of the Author" for slurring or skipping the record of her life
and times in a curious passage which curiously omits as unworthy o