The Honest Whore.—­There is in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot’s profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded.  A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness.  But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin.  The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.  When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don’s library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry—­perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!

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JOHN MARSTON.

Antonio and Mellida.—­The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the first part of this tragedy,—­where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a page—­resembles that of Lear and Kent, in that king’s distresses.  Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation.  The enemies which he enters lists to combat, “Despair and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience,” and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, “cornets of horse,” &c., are in the boldest style of allegory.  They are such a “race of mourners” as the “infection of sorrows loud” in the intellect might beget on some “pregnant cloud” in the imagination.  The prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old tales of Thebes or Pelops’ line, which Milton has so highly commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of “intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in without discretion corruptly to gratify the people.”  It is as solemn a preparative as the “warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse heard cry.”