sustained with any particular skill.  Such a play as “Fatal Curiosity” is as truthfully lifelike and more tragically exciting:  it is in mere moral power and charm, with just a touch of truer and purer poetry pervading and coloring and flavoring and quickening the whole, that the work of a Heywood approves itself as beyond the reach or the ambition of a Lillo.  One figure among many remains impressed on his reader’s memory once for all:  the play is full of incident, perhaps over-full of actors, excellently well written and passably well composed; but it lives, it survives and overtops its fellows, by grace of the character of its hero.  The underplot, whether aesthetically or historically considered, is not more singular and sensational than extravagant and unpleasant to natural taste as well as to social instinct:  the other agents in the main plot are little more than sketches—­sometimes deplorably out of drawing:  Anne is never really alive till on her death-bed, and her paramour is never alive—­in his temptation, his transgression, or his impenitence—­at all.  The whole play, as far as we remember or care to remember it, is Frankford:  he suffices to make it a noble poem and a memorable play.

The hero of “The English Traveller,” however worthy to stand beside him as a typical sample of English manhood at its noblest and gentlest, cannot be said to occupy so predominant a place in the conduct of the action or the memory of the reader.  The comic Plautine underplot—­Plautus always brought good luck to Heywood—­is so incomparably preferable to the ugly and unnatural though striking and original underplot of “A Woman Killed with Kindness” as wellnigh to counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, plausibility, and propriety in the main action.  The seduction of Mrs. Frankford is so roughly slurred over that it is hard to see how, if she could not resist a first whisper of temptation, she can ever have been the loyal wife and mother whose fall we are expected to deplore:  but the seduction of Mrs. Wincott, or rather her transformation from the likeness of a loyal and high-minded lady to the likeness of an impudent and hypocritical harlot, is neither explained nor explicable in the case of a woman who dies of a sudden shock of shame and penitence.  Her paramour is only not quite so shapeless and shadowy a scoundrel as the betrayer of Frankford:  but Heywood is no great hand at a villain:  his nobly simple conception and grasp and development of character will here be recognized only in the quiet and perfect portraiture of the two grand old gentlemen and the gallant unselfish youth whom no more subtle or elaborate draughtsman could have set before us in clearer or fuller outline, with more attractive and actual charm of feature and expression.