e work of Heywood as in the character of his
time: the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of
Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of
the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which
the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly
beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have
been classed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which
their author's fame must principally and finally depend than among those
which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his
work. There is much the same fusion of interests, as there is much the
same mixture of styles, in the conduct of a play for which we have once
more to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at once of Heywood
and of his admirers. That Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward
a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author of a play which a few
years ago had never seen the light is as evident as that his estimate of
the fine English quality which induced this recognition was justified by
all rules of moral evidence. There can be less than little doubt that
"Dick of Devonshire" is one of the two hundred and twenty in which
Heywood had "a main finger"--though not, I should say, by any means "an
entire hand." The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark:
though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for
smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect. Dick Pike is a
better study of the bluff and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in
"The Trial of Chivalry": and the same chivalrous sympathy with the
chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which
delights us in "A Challenge for Beauty" pervades and vivifies this
long-lost and long-forgotten play. The partial sacrifice of ethical
propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences
of the stage is rather more startling than usual: a fratricidal ravisher
and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance
the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being
happy though married. The hand of Heywood is more recognizable in the
presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his
others, and in the noble answer of the criminal's brother to their
father's very natural question: "Why dost thou take his part so?"

Because no drop of honor falls from