and put to shame, driven from lie to lie and reduced from retractation to retractation as witness after witness starts up against him from every successive corner of the witch’s dwelling, is as masterly in management of stage effect as any contrivance of the kind in any later and more famous comedy:  nor can I remember a more spirited and vivid opening to any play than the quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one breaks out at once into life-like action, full of present interest and promise of more to come.  The second scene, in which the fair sempstress appears at work in her father’s shop, recalls and indeed repeats the introduction of the heroine in an earlier play:  but here again the author’s touch is firmer and his simplicity more masculine than before.  This coincidence is at least as significant as that between the two samples of flogging-block doggrel collated for comparison by Mr. Fleay:  it is indeed a suggestive though superfluous confirmation of Heywood’s strangely questioned but surely unquestionable claim to the authorship of “The Fair Maid of the Exchange.”  A curious allusion to a more famous play of the author’s is the characteristic remark of the young ruffian Chartley:  “Well, I see you choleric hasty men are the kindest when all is done.  Here’s such wetting of handkerchers! he weeps to think of his wife, she weeps to see her father cry!  Peace, fool, we shall else have thee claim kindred of the woman killed with kindness.”  And in the fourth and last scene of the fourth act the same scoundrel is permitted to talk Shakespeare:  “I’ll go, although the devil and mischance look big.”

Poetical justice may cry out against the dramatic lenity which could tolerate or prescribe for the sake of a comfortable close to this comedy the triumphant escape of a villanous old impostor and baby-farmer from the condign punishment due to her misdeeds; but the severest of criminal judges if not of professional witch-finders might be satisfied with the justice or injustice done upon “the late Lancashire Witches” in the bright and vigorous tragicomedy which, as we learn from Mr. Fleay, so unwarrantably and uncharitably (despite a disclaimer in the epilogue) anticipated the verdict of their judges against the defenceless victims of terrified prepossession and murderous perjury.  But at this time of day the mere poetical reader or dramatic student need not concern himself, while reading a brilliant and delightful play, with the soundness or unsoundness of its moral and historical foundations.  There may have been a boy so really and so utterly possessed by the devil who seems now and then to enter into young creatures of human form and be-monster them as to amuse himself by denouncing helpless and harmless women to the most horrible of deaths on the most horrible of charges:  that hideous passing fact does not affect or impair the charming and lasting truth of Heywood’s unsurpassable study, the very model of a gallant and life-like English lad, all