d beside him
as a typical sample of English manhood at its noblest and gentlest,
cannot be said to occupy so predominant a place in the conduct of
the action or the memory of the reader. The comic Plautine
underplot--Plautus always brought good luck to Heywood--is so
incomparably preferable to the ugly and unnatural though striking and
original underplot of "A Woman Killed with Kindness" as wellnigh to
counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, plausibility, and
propriety in the main action. The seduction of Mrs. Frankford is so
roughly slurred over that it is hard to see how, if she could not resist
a first whisper of temptation, she can ever have been the loyal wife and
mother whose fall we are expected to deplore: but the seduction of Mrs.
Wincott, or rather her transformation from the likeness of a loyal and
high-minded lady to the likeness of an impudent and hypocritical harlot,
is neither explained nor explicable in the case of a woman who dies of a
sudden shock of shame and penitence. Her paramour is only not quite so
shapeless and shadowy a scoundrel as the betrayer of Frankford: but
Heywood is no great hand at a villain: his nobly simple conception and
grasp and development of character will here be recognized only in the
quiet and perfect portraiture of the two grand old gentlemen and the
gallant unselfish youth whom no more subtle or elaborate draughtsman
could have set before us in clearer or fuller outline, with more
attractive and actual charm of feature and expression.

"The Fair Maid of the West" is one of Heywood's most characteristic
works, and one of his most delightful plays. Inartistic as this sort of
dramatic poem may seem to the lovers of theatrical composition and
sensational arrangement, of emotional calculations and premeditated
shocks, it has a place of its own, and a place of honor, among the
incomparably various forms of noble and serious drama which English
poets of the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and left as models
impossible to reproduce or to rival in any generation of poets or
readers, actors or spectators, after the decadent forces of English
genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and
creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into
everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism. Before
that blight had fallen upon the country of Shakespeare, the variety and
fertility of dramatic form and dramatic energy which disti