quity in style. The self-willed if high-minded Phyllis Flower has
something in her of Heywood's later heroines, Bess Bridges of Plymouth
and Luce the goldsmith's daughter, but is hardly as interesting or
attractive as either.

Much less than this can be said for the heroines, if heroines they can
in any sense be called, of the two plays by which Heywood is best known
as a tragic and a comic painter of contemporary life among his
countrymen. It is certainly not owing to any exceptional power of
painting or happiness in handling feminine character that the first
place among his surviving works has been generally and rationally
assigned to "A Woman Killed with Kindness." The fame of this famous
realistic tragedy is due to the perfect fitness of the main subject for
treatment in the manner of which Heywood was in his day and remains to
the present day beyond all comparison the greatest and the most
admirable master. It is not that the interest is either naturally
greater, or greater by force and felicity of genius in the dramatist,
than that of other and far inferior plays. It is not that the action is
more artistically managed: it is not that curiosity or sympathy is
aroused or sustained with any particular skill. Such a play as "Fatal
Curiosity" is as truthfully lifelike and more tragically exciting: it is
in mere moral power and charm, with just a touch of truer and purer
poetry pervading and coloring and flavoring and quickening the whole,
that the work of a Heywood approves itself as beyond the reach or the
ambition of a Lillo. One figure among many remains impressed on his
reader's memory once for all: the play is full of incident, perhaps
over-full of actors, excellently well written and passably well
composed; but it lives, it survives and overtops its fellows, by grace
of the character of its hero. The underplot, whether aesthetically or
historically considered, is not more singular and sensational than
extravagant and unpleasant to natural taste as well as to social
instinct: the other agents in the main plot are little more than
sketches--sometimes deplorably out of drawing: Anne is never really
alive till on her death-bed, and her paramour is never alive--in his
temptation, his transgression, or his impenitence--at all. The whole
play, as far as we remember or care to remember it, is Frankford: he
suffices to make it a noble poem and a memorable play.

The hero of "The English Traveller," however worthy to stan