the author himself, in
committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and
frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition
and versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce
was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need
not shrink from comparison with Fletcher's more elaborate, rhetorical,
elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of "The Loyal Subject"; that the
somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood's hero is not more slavish or
foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher's; and that even if
we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive
straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the
elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential
servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the
Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood. The
humor is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest
in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality
and versatility is as genuine and honest as the serious exposition of
character is straightforward and sincere.

The best of Heywood's romantic plays is the most graceful and beautiful,
in detached scenes and passages, of all his extant works. The
combination of the two plots--they can hardly be described as plot and
underplot--is so dexterously happy that it would do the highest credit
to a more famous and ambitious artist: the rival heroes are so really
noble and attractive that we are agreeably compelled to condone whatever
seems extravagant or preposterous in their relations or their conduct:
there is a breath of quixotism in the air which justifies and ennobles
it. The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit: it is the
more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less
of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for
striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in
ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from
Heywood. But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing
may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found
with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood's genius at its
happiest and brightest as "A Challenge for Beauty."

The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as
difficult to determine in th