temper or a more fastidious generation than the respective audiences of patrician and plebeian London in the age of Shakespeare.  The leading young man of this comedy now under notice is represented as “a wild-headed gentleman,” and revealed as an abject ruffian of unredeemed and irredeemable rascality.  As much and even more may be said of the execrable wretch who fills a similar part in an admirably written play published thirty-six years earlier and verified for the first time as Heywood’s by the keen research and indefatigable intuition of Mr. Fleay.  The parallel passages cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots are more than suggestive, even if they be not proof positive, of identity in authorship:  but the identity in atrocity of the two hideous figures who play the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as more serious evidence.  The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced than Master Shakespeare’s.  As for the other member of Webster’s famous triad, I fear that the most indulgent sentence passed on Master Dekker, if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence, could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic.  But he was apparently if not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly outrages, to despatch by poison.  The excuse for Heywood is simply that in his day as in Chaucer’s the orthodox ideal of a married heroine was still none other than Patient Grizel:  Shakespeare alone had got beyond it.

The earlier of these two plays, “a pleasant” if somewhat sensational “comedy entitled ‘How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,’” is written for the most part in Heywood’s most graceful and poetical vein of verse, with beautiful simplicity, purity, and fluency of natural and musical style.  In none of his plays is the mixture or rather the fusion of realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious:  the rescue of the injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet, she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any but the very greatest among Heywood’s fellow-poets.  There is no merit of this kind in the later play:  but from the dramatic if not even from the ethical point of view it is, on the whole, a riper and more rational sort of work.  The culmination of accumulating evidence by which the rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed