There are touches of pathetic interest and romantic invention in “A Maidenhead Well Lost”:  two or three of the leading characters are prettily sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is a graceful compromise between unambitious poetry and mildly spirited prose:  but it is hardly to be classed among Heywood’s best work of the kind:  it has no scenes of such fervid and noble interest, such vivid and keen emotion as distinguish “A Challenge for Beauty”:  and for all its simple grace of writing and ingenuous ingenuity of plot it may not improbably be best remembered by the average modern reader as remarkable for the most amusing and astonishing example on record of anything but “inexplicable” dumb show—­to be paralleled only and hardly by a similar interlude of no less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche—­“La Reine d’Espagne.”

Little favor has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors to “The Royal King and the Loyal Subject”:  and the author himself, in committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition and versification.  Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need not shrink from comparison with Fletcher’s more elaborate, rhetorical, elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of “The Loyal Subject”; that the somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood’s hero is not more slavish or foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher’s; and that even if we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood.  The humor is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality and versatility is as genuine and honest as the serious exposition of character is straightforward and sincere.

The best of Heywood’s romantic plays is the most graceful and beautiful, in detached scenes and passages, of all his extant works.  The combination of the two plots—­they can hardly be described as plot and underplot—­is so dexterously happy that it would do the highest credit to a more famous and ambitious artist:  the rival heroes are so really noble and attractive that we are agreeably compelled to condone whatever seems extravagant or preposterous in their relations or their conduct:  there is a breath of quixotism in the air which justifies and ennobles it.  The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit:  it is the more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from Heywood.  But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood’s genius at its happiest and brightest as “A Challenge for Beauty.”