parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and
Puss.]

It is a pity that Heywood's civic or professional devotion to the
service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in
the transfiguration of the idealized prentice: it is a greater pity that
we cannot exchange all Heywood's extant masques for any one of the two
hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he "had either
an entire hand, or at least a main finger." The literary department of a
Lord Mayor's show can hardly be considered as belonging to literature,
even when a poet's time and trouble were misemployed in compiling the
descriptive prose and the declamatory verse contributed to the ceremony.
Not indeed that it was a poet who devoted so much toil and good-will to
celebration or elucidation of the laborious projects and objects both by
water and land which then distinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs,
pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas Brothers and their most
ingenious parent were employed in a more honorable capacity than the
subordinate function of versifier or showman--an office combining the
parts and the duties of the immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr.
Shum. Lexicographers might pick out of the text some rare if not unique
Latinisms or barbarisms such as "prestigion" and "strage": but except
for the purpose of such "harmless drudges" and perhaps of an occasional
hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the
attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as
barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of
study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or
American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such
constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or
Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood's or
Shakespeare's time there is something comparatively not contemptible;
the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a
simple historic purity and dignity of its own; the dulness is not so
dreary as the dulness of mediaeval prosers, the commonplace is not so
vulgar as the commonplace of more modern scribes.

"The Trial of Chivalry" is a less extravagant example of homely romantic
drama than "The Four Prentices of London." We owe to Mr. Bullen the
rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and
verification of its authorship. In styl