ng of "dust and damned oblivion." Meantime we may be heartily
thankful for the recovery of an excellent piece of work, written
throughout with the easy mastery of serious or humorous verse, the
graceful pliancy of style and the skilful simplicity of composition,
which might have been expected from a mature work of Heywood's, though
the execution of it would now and then have suggested an earlier date.
The clown, it may be noticed, is the same who always reappears to do
the necessary comicalities in Heywood's plays; if hardly "a fellow of
infinite jest," yet an amusing one in his homely way; though one would
have thought that on the homeliest London stage of 1624 the taste for
antiphonal improvisation of doggrel must have passed into the limbo of
obsolete simplicities. The main plot is very well managed, as with
Plautus once more for a model might properly have been expected; the
rather ferociously farcical underplot must surely have been borrowed
from some _fabliau_. The story has been done into doggrel by George
Colman the younger: but that cleanly and pure minded censor of the press
would hardly have licensed for the stage a play which would have
required, if the stage-carpenter had been then in existence, the
production of a scene which would have anticipated what Gautier so
plausibly plumed himself upon as a novelty in stage effect--imagined for
the closing scene of his imaginary tragedy of "Heliogabalus."

There are touches of pathetic interest and romantic invention in "A
Maidenhead Well Lost": two or three of the leading characters are
prettily sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is a graceful
compromise between unambitious poetry and mildly spirited prose: but it
is hardly to be classed among Heywood's best work of the kind: it has
no scenes of such fervid and noble interest, such vivid and keen emotion
as distinguish "A Challenge for Beauty": and for all its simple grace of
writing and ingenuous ingenuity of plot it may not improbably be best
remembered by the average modern reader as remarkable for the most
amusing and astonishing example on record of anything but "inexplicable"
dumb show--to be paralleled only and hardly by a similar interlude of no
less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole
dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche--"La Reine d'Espagne."

Little favor has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors
to "The Royal King and the Loyal Subject": and