The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as difficult to determine in the work of Heywood as in the character of his time:  the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have been classed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which their author’s fame must principally and finally depend than among those which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his work.  There is much the same fusion of interests, as there is much the same mixture of styles, in the conduct of a play for which we have once more to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at once of Heywood and of his admirers.  That Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author of a play which a few years ago had never seen the light is as evident as that his estimate of the fine English quality which induced this recognition was justified by all rules of moral evidence.  There can be less than little doubt that “Dick of Devonshire” is one of the two hundred and twenty in which Heywood had “a main finger”—­though not, I should say, by any means “an entire hand.”  The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark:  though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect.  Dick Pike is a better study of the bluff and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in “The Trial of Chivalry”:  and the same chivalrous sympathy with the chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which delights us in “A Challenge for Beauty” pervades and vivifies this long-lost and long-forgotten play.  The partial sacrifice of ethical propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences of the stage is rather more startling than usual:  a fratricidal ravisher and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being happy though married.  The hand of Heywood is more recognizable in the presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his others, and in the noble answer of the criminal’s brother to their father’s very natural question:  “Why dost thou take his part so?”

   Because no drop of honor falls from him
   But I bleed with it.

This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as traceable in the earlier as in the later of Heywood’s extant works:  he is English of the English in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, when suppression is no longer either possible or proper, of all noble and gentle and natural emotion.  His passion and his pathos, his loyalty and his chivalry, are always so unobtrusive that their modesty may sometimes run the risk of eclipse before the glory of more splendid poets and more conspicuous patriots:  but they are true and trustworthy as Shakespeare’s or Milton’s or Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s or Browning’s.