none of his plays is the mixture or rather the fusion of
realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious: the rescue of the
injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet,
she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed
poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any
but the very greatest among Heywood's fellow-poets. There is no merit of
this kind in the later play: but from the dramatic if not even from the
ethical point of view it is, on the whole, a riper and more rational
sort of work. The culmination of accumulating evidence by which the
rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed and put to shame, driven from lie
to lie and reduced from retractation to retractation as witness after
witness starts up against him from every successive corner of the
witch's dwelling, is as masterly in management of stage effect as any
contrivance of the kind in any later and more famous comedy: nor can I
remember a more spirited and vivid opening to any play than the
quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one breaks out at
once into life-like action, full of present interest and promise of more
to come. The second scene, in which the fair sempstress appears at work
in her father's shop, recalls and indeed repeats the introduction of the
heroine in an earlier play: but here again the author's touch is firmer
and his simplicity more masculine than before. This coincidence is at
least as significant as that between the two samples of flogging-block
doggrel collated for comparison by Mr. Fleay: it is indeed a suggestive
though superfluous confirmation of Heywood's strangely questioned but
surely unquestionable claim to the authorship of "The Fair Maid of the
Exchange." A curious allusion to a more famous play of the author's is
the characteristic remark of the young ruffian Chartley: "Well, I see
you choleric hasty men are the kindest when all is done. Here's such
wetting of handkerchers! he weeps to think of his wife, she weeps to see
her father cry! Peace, fool, we shall else have thee claim kindred of
the woman killed with kindness." And in the fourth and last scene of the
fourth act the same scoundrel is permitted to talk Shakespeare: "I'll
go, although the devil and mischance look big."

Poetical justice may cry out against the dramatic lenity which could
tolerate or prescribe for the sake of a comfortable close to this comedy
the triumphant escape of a