and its
sequel. Not that there is anywhere any want of good simple spirited
work, homely and lively and appropriate to the ambitious humility of the
design; a design which aims at making popular and familiar to the
citizens of Elizabethan London the whole cycle of heroic legend from the
reign of Saturn to the death of Helen. Jupiter, the young hero of the
first two plays and ages, is a really brilliant and amusing mixture of
Amadis, Sigurd, and Don Juan: the pretty scene in which his infant life
is spared and saved must be familiar, and pleasantly familiar, to all
worthy lovers of Charles Lamb. The verse underlined and immortalized by
his admiration--"For heaven's sake, when you kill him, hurt him
not"--should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer.
I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the
most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the
moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of
Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward
as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals,
could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even
Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism. There is spirit
of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of war and adventure that
follow: Heywood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn and the Titans
very human and simple figures, whose doings and sufferings are presented
with child-like straightforwardness in smooth and fluent verse and in
dialogue which wants neither strength nor ease nor propriety. The
subsequent episode of Danae is treated with such frank and charming
fusion of realism and romance as could only have been achieved in the
age of Shakespeare. To modern readers it may seem unfortunate for
Heywood that a poet who never (to the deep and universal regret of all
competent readers) followed up the dramatic promise of his youth, as
displayed in the nobly vivid and pathetic little tragedy of "Sir Peter
Harpdon's End," should in our day have handled the story of Danae and
the story of Bellerophon so effectively as to make it impossible for the
elder poet either to escape or to sustain comparison with the author of
"The Earthly Paradise"; but the most appreciative admirers of Morris
will not be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to the
admirable qualities displayed in Heywood's dramatic treatment of these
legends. The