The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic literature.  Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised the editor “to begin with the collected plays of Heywood”:  which as yet, like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious or scholarly sense of the term.  The existing reprints merely reproduce, without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text of the worst early editions:  while Middleton has for upward of half a century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accounted his equals if not his superiors in poetic if not in dramatic genius.  Even for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest ability there is comparatively little to do where Mr. Dyce has been before him in the field.  However, we must all give glad and grateful welcome to a new edition of a noble poet who has never yet received his full meed of praise and justice:  though our gratitude and our gladness may be quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense of further favors to come.

The first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton was not spoken by Charles Lamb.  Four years before the appearance of the priceless volume which established his fame forever among all true lovers of English poetry by copious excerpts from five of his most characteristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the fifty-sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical romance of “Sir Tristrem,” had given a passing word of recognition to the “horribly striking” power of “some passages” in Middleton’s masterpiece:  which was first reprinted eleven years later, in the fourth volume of Dilke’s Old Plays.  Lamb, surprisingly enough, has given not a single extract from that noble tragedy:  it was reserved for Leigh Hunt, when speaking of its author, to remark that “there is one character of his (De Flores in ‘The Changeling’) which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life.”  The praise is not a whit too high; the truth could not have been better said.

The play with which Mr. Bullen, altering the arrangement adopted by Mr. Dyce, opens his edition of Middleton, is a notable example of the best and the worst qualities which distinguish or disfigure the romantic comedy of the Shakespearean age.  The rude and reckless composition, the rough intrusion of savorless farce, the bewildering combinations of incident and the far more bewildering fluctuations of character—­all the inconsistencies, incongruities, incoherences of the piece are forgotten when the reader remembers and reverts to the passages of exquisite and fascinating beauty which relieve and redeem the utmost errors of negligence and haste.  To find anything more delightful, more satisfying in its pure and simple perfection of loveliness, we must turn to the very best examples of Shakespeare’s youthful work.  Nay, it must be allowed that in one or two of the master’s earliest plays—­in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” for instance—­we shall find nothing comparable for charm and sincerity of sweet and passionate fancy with such enchanting verses as these: