etcher, tripped and fell now and then over this awkward
stone of stumbling--a very rock of offence to readers of a more exacting
temper or a more fastidious generation than the respective audiences of
patrician and plebeian London in the age of Shakespeare. The leading
young man of this comedy now under notice is represented as "a
wild-headed gentleman," and revealed as an abject ruffian of unredeemed
and irredeemable rascality. As much and even more may be said of the
execrable wretch who fills a similar part in an admirably written play
published thirty-six years earlier and verified for the first time as
Heywood's by the keen research and indefatigable intuition of Mr. Fleay.
The parallel passages cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots
are more than suggestive, even if they be not proof positive, of
identity in authorship: but the identity in atrocity of the two hideous
figures who play the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as
more serious evidence. The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables
by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and
school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as
even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have
pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his
humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced
than Master Shakespeare's. As for the other member of Webster's famous
triad, I fear that the most indulgent sentence passed on Master Dekker,
if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence,
could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic. But he was
apparently if not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of
presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable
transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife
he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly
outrages, to despatch by poison. The excuse for Heywood is simply that
in his day as in Chaucer's the orthodox ideal of a married heroine was
still none other than Patient Grizel: Shakespeare alone had got beyond
it.

The earlier of these two plays, "a pleasant" if somewhat sensational
"comedy entitled 'How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,'" is written for
the most part in Heywood's most graceful and poetical vein of verse,
with beautiful simplicity, purity, and fluency of natural and musical
style. In