anachronism. But surely Massinger could have no right, after authorising this prologue, to reflect on Ben.

With this doubtful exception, our author seems to have lived on good terms with all his brethren. No line in his plays could annoy any writer-living or dead-which is more than can be said for Shakspeare, who was rather prone to parody. Shirley, Ford, May, Goff (in a Latin epigram which would puzzle Martial, and break Priscian's heart), George Donne (whom Mr. Weber innocently confounded with Dr. John Donne), and a cortege of Jays, and W. B.'s, and T. J.'s, heralded his plays, like the dwarf before the giant, with commendatory verses, which it is well to accept as testimonies of friendship-for assuredly they are good for nothing else.

His dedications are beautiful samples of pure mother English, commendable for a self-respectful respectfulness, very different from the presumptuous adulation of Dryden and Young, but painful from their weary iteration of complaint and acknowledgment—

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning;

Alas! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.-WORDSWORTH.

Complaint seems to have become habitual to him, like the sickly tone of a confirmed valetudinarian, who thinks you unfeeling if you tell him he is looking well. We are accustomed to hear of the peaceful days of Charles, as days when the sister Muses sang together in the warm light of a Christian Phoebus. Yet Massinger continually talks of his "despised quality," and addresses each successive dedicatee as his sole and last hope. Gifford says, "all Massinger's patrons were persons of worth and consideration." He never degraded himself, like poor Otway, by dedicating to a titled courtezan; but his principal patron, Philip of Pembroke and Montgomery, has left a stain upon the name of Herbert which no dedication can wash away. His ignorance and cowardice have, no doubt, been much exaggerated; but of his brutality, meanness, and ingratitude, there can be no doubt at all.

The only undramatic poem (if so it may be called) of any length that Massinger has left, memorializes the death of this nobleman's eldest son, who died at Florence, January, 1636. It might as well be forgotten-if it were not for one passage, curious as illustrating the customs of the age.

That great ladies mourn

His sudden death, and lords vie at his urn

Drops of compassion; that true sorrow fed

With showers of tears, still bathes the widowed bed

Of his dear spouse

Now this "dear spouse" had never been, in any rational or Christian sense, a wife at all. Charles Lord Herbert was married (if the profane abuse of a holy ceremony can constitute marriage) to Mary, daughter of Villiers Duke of Buckingham, 1634, when the poor little girl was so young, that it was expedient the bridegroom should immediately set out on his travels. Providence employed the small-pox to disappoint the avarice or ambition of the match-makers. Had this young couple arrived at nubile years, would either of them have been bound in conscience to stand to the bargain?

Is it not lamentable to see a man like Massinger, whom we would preserve in everlasting remembrance, constrained to write nonsense for a poor pittance from one who deserved not the impunity of oblivion?

Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se

Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.-JUVENAL, iii 152.

The woes of poverty might well be borne,

Were not the poor compelled to merit scorn.

Massinger did feel, painfully feel his humiliation. The degradation of patronage ate into his soul. It is good to be dependent, where the dependency grows out of natural relation, or constituted order. But to sue for dependence;—to court the bondage of obligation, as it is a sore evil for any

man, so for the highly-gifted and high-minded it is worse than pauperism. Literature is a bad trade; but it is better to pursue it as a trade, than calculate upon the bounty of great ones, which is only honourable when "it droppeth as the gracious dew from heaven." To inward disquietude, and a desire to utter in falsetto what his poverty forbade him to speak in his natural tones, rather than to any sincere sympathy with the nascent republicanism of his age, we must ascribe the angry dislike of kings, and courts, and ministers, which is so obtrusive in Massinger's plays, and the unnecessary,―unpoetical baseness of many of his characters. His political sentiments, abstractedly considered, are, for the most part, just; but they are thrust in head and shoulders, where there is no dramatic call for them. He could not get fairly out of England-not the grand ancestral England of imaginative patriotism—but the factious, quarrelsome, half-servile, half-rebellious England of his own day. He felt the manacles about him,

And dragged, at each remove, à lengthening chain.

His political allusions sometimes brought him into trouble; and if King Charles had not been more liberal than Sir Henry (who did little more credit to the name of Herbert than his kinsman Philip), he might have suffered more severely. On the 11th January, 1631, the Master of the Revels refused to license a play of his, the name of which has not transpired, "because it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal by Philip II., there being peace sworn between England and Spain. I had my fee notwithstanding, which belongs to me for reading it over, and ought always to be brought with a book." So far Sir Henry, who seems to have been a mighty gnat-strainer, and a bit of a puritan, who reconciled his conscience to the profane employment of reading and allowing plays, by exacting the uttermost farthing from poet and player-holding with his fellow-creature in Sheffield's Session,

Though the function was wicked-the salary was good.

Now mark the difference between a Jack in office and a generous King. In 1638, when the dispute ran high about ship-money, Massinger produced a play on the history of Don Pedro the Cruel, called "The King and Subject," in which occurred the following passage :—

Monies? We'll raise supplies which ways we please,

And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which

We 'll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars

In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws

But what their swords did ratify; the wives

And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their wills as deities, &c.

"This is a piece taken out of Philip Massinger's play, called the King and the Subject, and entered here for ever, to be remembered by my son, and those that cast their eyes upon it, in honour of king Charles my master, who reading over the play at Newmarket, set his mark upon the place with his own hand, and in these words :-'This is too insolent, and to be changed.' Note, that the poet makes it the speech of a king, Don Pedro, king of Spain, and spoken to his subjects." -Register of Master of Revels.

Now there can be little doubt, that by Don Pedro Massinger meant King Charles, and more than insinuated that the liberty taken with the people's purse would be extended to their wives and daughters; and had Charles not chanced to read the play at Newmarket, ten to one Sir Henry would have dealt with Don Pedro as he did with Don Sebastian, pocketed his fee, and left the poet his pains for his labour. But the king was content to set his mark over the obnoxious passage, and gave his special allowance to the writer who had gone out of the way for a clap-trap at his expense. In the same register we read :

"At Greenwich, the 4th of June. Mr. W. Murray gave me power from the king to allow of the play, and told me that he would warrant it."

Sir Henry informs us that the name of the play was altered. Mr. Malone conjectures that it was the "Tyrant" before mentioned; but I do not see how that could mend the matter. It was acted June 5, 1638, but never printed, and has not been found. The subject has great dramatic

capabilities; but I doubt whether Massinger would treat it worthily either of the theme, or of himself. Neither Tragedy nor Comedy, in the strictest force of the terms, was his province. Besides, he had an unlucky habit of getting into a passion with his bad characters, and making them wilful demonstrators of their own depravity. Smollett, particularly in his Count Fathom, falls into this mistake. Euripides was not free from it. It nowhere occurs in Homer, Cervantes, or Shakspeare, the great and true dramatists, and very seldom in Fielding or Sir Walter Scott.

Massinger's excellence—a great and beautiful excellence it is-was in the expression of virtue, in its probation, its strife, its victory. He could not, like Shakspeare, invest the perverted will with the terrors of a magnificent intellect, or bestow the cestus of poetry on simple unconscious loveliness. We draw to a close. After "The King and Subject," so happy in its timely expurgation, Massinger produced two dramas, "Alexius, or the Chaste Lover," and "The Fair Anchoress of Pausilippo." It is a pity they are both lost, for the titles promise much in his best way. The last was acted in January, 1640. On the 16th March in the same year, he went to bed in apparent health, and was found dead in the morning in his house on the Bankside. Such is the received account; but he seems to have had none to care for him, none to mark his symptoms, or to detect the slow decay which he might conceal in despair of sympathy.

Poorly, poor man, he lived-poorly, poor man, he died.

He was buried in the churchyard of St. Saviour's, and the comedians were his only mournersperhaps half envious of his escape from the storm that was already grumbling afar, and sending ahead its herald billows. No stone marked his neglected resting-place, but in the parish register appears this brief memorial, "March 20, 1639-40-buried Philip Massinger, a STRANGER." His sepulchre was like his life, obscure: like the nightingale, he sung darkling—it is to be feared, like the nightingale of the fable, with his breast against a thorn.*

JOHN FORD + was descended from a family long settled in the north of Devonshire. Those who have an opportunity of consulting Prince's "Worthies of Devon," may find a great deal about his genealogy, but little or nothing about himself. Suffice it to say, that Thomas Ford, of Ilsington, married the sister or daughter "of the famous Lord Chief Justice Popham, and had issue John the Poet and several others." John the Poet was baptized in Ilsington church, 17th April, 1586, and became a member of the Middle Temple, November 1602. He found a cousin, John Ford (the Fords were almost all Johns,) at Gray's Inn. No small advantage is it for a youth, on his first entrance at town or college, to have a kinsman or friend established just before him, old enough for a counsellor, and not too old for a companion. To the influence of John Ford, of Gray's Inn, it

* Following Gifford, I was here led into an error in the first edition, which I suffer to stand in the text, the more to fix attention on the correction. Massinger was buried in St. Saviour's, March 18, 1638-9; and no less a sum than £2 was paid for his funeral, which shows that he was interred with unusual cost and ceremony. Gifford (strangely enough) did not know that every person there buried, who did not belong to the parish, was termed “a stranger." See these facts in Collier's Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakspeare.

† Lucian wrote a whimsical piece called Az Carnitas, the lawsuit of the bowels. The letter E might find ground for litigation in the names of Shakspear or Shakespeare, Massinger or Messenger, and Ford or Forde. I am not aware that any autograph of the last has been discovered; but the anagram, Fide Honor, seen in the title-pages of some of his plays, pleads for the final E. I doubt, however, if anagrams are legal evidence in these cases; and the matter is not worth contesting,-as this anagram is no way significant or præfigurative, like some which Camden has collected. The most extraordinary instance of anagrammatical prophecy that I remember, is that of Horatio Nelson, -Honor est a Nilo. The Cabala cannot equal it.

This observation I owe to my late father, who often used to dwell on the advantage he derived from finding his fellow Christ's-boy Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, at Cambridge, and the loss he sustained at the departure of such a guide and example. I experienced a similar loss at Oxford, in the late Bishop of Barbadoes, now master of St. Augustine's College, Canterbury, though his rank in the university would have prohibited him from associating with a freshman who was not his kinsman.

may perhaps be attributed, that John Ford, of the Middle Temple, stuck to his legal studies, and persevered in his profession, seemingly with good success, though we know not what was the peculiar nature of his professional engagements. He did not forget the obligation, but affectionately remembered his cousin, and is anxious to proclaim to the world, that he had not left his "calling for the idle trade *"

As plays and masques were periodically represented by the Inns of Court, a young lawyer's becoming a writer of plays could be no indecorum: yet it was not in this line that Ford first appeared in print. He was early in the field. In 1606, in his eighteenth year, he published “Fame's Memorial," a tribute to the memory of Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy +, for by that title he is better and more honourably known, than by the earldom of Devonshire. It is dedicated to the Lady Penelope, the unhappy cause of the great Mountjoy's unhappiness. Ford speaks of himself as a young stranger, totally unknown" to the lady, and probably to her lord also; but the sad history and premature death of such a man must have been rife in the mouths of men, and well might actuate a genius yet in the egg, but destined to be potent in the issues of erratic passion.

The dread strife

Of poor humanity's afflicted will

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.-WORDSWORTH.

I say genius in the egg, for a young crocodile could not crawl forth from the shell, prematurely crushed, a more unseemly miniature of its future self, than "Fame's Memorial" presents of the future Ford. It is worth reading as a warning to all those figure-casters who prognosticate the success or failure of authors from their Juvenilia. Had any seer predicted that the maker of all that stuff was to deserve a lofty seat among England's dramatists, he would have been as heartily laughed at, as he who should have foretold to Trajan, that a Christian priest would one day fulminate

* His dedications are tiresomely iterative upon this point. He calls "The Lover's Melancholy" "the first fruits of his leisure,"-" "Tis Pity, &c.," "the first fruits of his leisure," The Lady's Trial," the issue of less serious hours;" and he tells the Earl of Antrim, to whom he presented the "Fancies Chaste and Noble," that his "courtship of greatness never aimed at any thrift." So much the better; but what was all this to the public or his patrons cither? Ford's dedications present a curious contrast to Massinger's in another respect. In all his dramas his language, when not obscured by vain emulation of Shakspeare's involution and superfœtation of thought, is as clear as the stars on a frosty night when there is no moon,-but in his prose addresses he is sometimes as laboriously unintelligible as if he would give the Sphynx a lesson-that might have saved her life-to secure her meaning from being guessed by having no meaning at all. Take a specimen: "As plurality hath reference to a multitude, so I care not to please many, but where there is a parity of condition, there the freedom of construction makes the best music." Is not this curiosa infelicitas?

The life of this great man is the finest subject for biography now unoccupied. He was the true conqueror of Ireland, the friendly rival of Essex,-the more his friend because he had been his rival; but that sad destiny which makes some men martyrs,-and inflicts on others infinite pains, far worse than martyrdom,-tried Mountjoy to the utmost. If he failed,-let him that has no sin throw the first stone. He loved the sister of Essex, and she loved him. But the Court of Wards interfered, and she was sold to Lord Rich. The natural consequences followed. Yet neither Mountjoy nor the lady suffered in reputation, till they married. It is difficult to calculate the issues of etiquette. Court morality, when it is at the best, was rather conventional at all times,-so, as long as Lord Mountjoy (made Earl of Devonshire by James L.) suffered his connexion.with Lady Rich to be a thing which everybody knew but nobody was obliged to know, all went on well. The lady was received, and Mountjoy enjoyed the favour which his public service had earned. The lady parted from the man who, taking her against her will, must be deemed guilty of what the law, till lately, punished with death, a penalty which should have remained as long as death was inflicted at all. Yet I say not that Mountjoy and she did right. However bitter the cup of duty may be, duty commands us to drink it even to the dregs.

Laud married them. King James said, "Ye have gotten a fair woman with a foul heart." I hope this was not true. But Mountjoy felt it. He that might fairly have claimed the highest place among England's subjects for his well-deserving, pined away, and died untimely,-the victim of an iniquitous law and an unfortunate passion. Ford was not the only poet that wept for the death of Mountjoy. The moral Daniel wrote one of his sweetest monodies on that occasion.

Ford no doubt remembered Mountjoy and his hapless love when he wrote the "Broken Heart." By far the fines scene in all the old Dramatists (Shakspeare of course excepted) is that in which Penthea laments her "cnforced marriage."

from the Seven Hills more dreaded edicts than his own. In the paucity of direct information, we are glad to hang a conjecture on any loop of an author's raggedness. Mr. Gifford has discovered, from certain hints in the Memorial," that Ford, at eighteen, was the prey of a hopeless passion for a nymph so cruel, as to earn the classical appellation of Lycia, or she-wolf. Most poets think it necessary to be, or to have been, in love, and most men at eighteen fancy themselves so.

Ford submitted to the usual dramatic apprenticeship, and like the pupils of the great masters in painting, was content to forward the works which his elders had designed, or retouch what time had discoloured. He assisted Webster in "A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother," a play not extant, and perhaps no great loss. Such as have an appetite that way, and no dread of the nightmare, may "sup full of horrors" on the remaining dramas of Webster. No doubt it was of the same class with "Arden of Feversham," and the "Yorkshire Tragedy." He joined with Decker in the "Fairy Knight" and the "Bristowe Merchant "--both lost. The latter was probably founded on some recent event. "An Ill Beginning has a Good End," acted at the Cockpit, 1613, "The London Merchant," "The Royal Combat," and "Beauty in a Trance," entered on the Stationers' books, but not printed, were used up by Mr. Warburton's cook.

The "Witch of Edmonton,” by Decker, Rowley, and Ford, probably appeared about 1622 or 1623, for a woman, named Elizabeth Sawyer, was executed on a charge of witchcraft in 1621, and the play was evidently got up to take advantage of a temporary excitement; it has all the incongruity that might be expected in a hasty work of three authors. Ford once more united with Decker in the "Sun's Darling," a moral masque, acted March, 1623-24, but supposed to be a recast of an older piece. The last act, which bears the strongest marks of Ford, may have been written at a later period, after the accession of Charles I., as it evidently alludes to the Scotch, and their repugnance to the religious ordinances of the prelacy*. As it was not printed till 1657, when it appeared under

Raybright," the Sun's Darling," having successfully sated himself with the other Seasons, threatens to visit the realm of Winter, by which Scotland is evidently intended-much to the consternation of the poorer inhabitants, two of whom open the 5th act, with politic grumblings, for which they are thus rebuked by Winter:

What sullen murmurings does your gall bring forth?
Will you prov't true, "No good comes from the north?"

Bold, saucy mortals, dare you then aspire

With snow and ice to quench the sphere of fire?

Are your hearts frozen like your clime, from thence

All temperate heat's fled of obedience?

How durst you else with force think to withstand

Your Prince's entry into this his land?

A Prince, who is so excellently good,

His virtue is his honour, more than blood;

In whose clear nature, as two suns, do rise

The attributes of merciful and wise;

Whose laws are so impartial, they must

Be counted heavenly, 'cause they 're truly just:

Yet you, wild fools, possess'd with giant rage,

Dare, in your lawless fury, think to wage

War against Heaven; and from his shining throne

Pull Jove himself, for you to tread upon;

Were your heads circled with his own green oak,

Yet are they subject to his thunder-stroke;

And he can sink such wretches as rebel,

From Heaven's sublime height to the depth of Hell.

1st. Clown. The devil he can as soon! We fear no colours; let him do his worst; there's many a tall fellow, besides us, will rather die than see his living taken from them, nay, even eat up: all things are grown so dear, there's no enduring more mouths than our own, neighbour.

2nd. Clown. They say this Prince too would bring new laws upon us; new rites into the temples of our Gods; and

that's abominable.

Winter A most fair pretence,

To found rebellion upon conscience!