in color and in outline, some of his slighter sketches have a freshness and tenderness of beauty which may well atone for the gravest of his certainly not infrequent offences.  The sweet constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the reader’s mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina and Isabella.  In fact, the better characters in Marston’s plays are better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of the baser sort.  Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who paints virtue better than vice, and has a happier hand at a hero’s likeness than at a villain’s, must unquestionably be assigned to the author of “Antonio and Mellida.”  Piero, the tyrant and traitor, is little more than a mere stage property:  like Mendoza in “The Malcontent” and Syphax in “Sophonisba,” he would be a portentous ruffian if he had a little more life in him; he has to do the deeds and express the emotions of a most bloody and crafty miscreant; but it is only now and then that we catch the accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or menace, dissimulation or triumph.  Andrugio, the venerable and heroic victim of his craft and cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than stately and impressive:  the changes of mood from meditation to passion, from resignation to revolt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark the development of the character with the process of the action, though painted rather broadly than subtly and with more of vigor than of care, show just such power of hand and sincerity of instinct as we fail to find in the hot and glaring colors of his rival’s monotonous ruffianism.  Again, in “The Wonder of Women,” the majestic figures of Massinissa, Gelosso, and Sophonisba stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of the senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the monstrous profile of the sorceress Erichtho.  In this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in the two parts of “Antonio and Mellida,” we see the poet at his best—­and also at his worst.  A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way through a cactus hedge:  the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic monstrosities of metaphor.  The straining and sputtering declamation of narrative and oratory scarcely succeeds in expressing through a dozen quaint and far-fetched words or phrases what two or three of the simplest would easily and amply have sufficed to convey.  But when the poet is content to deliver his message like a man of this world,