[Footnote 1:  Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun Society that the real author of “A Game at Chess” was none other than John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before the publication of that anti-papal satire.  This discovery is only less curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the same authority, that “Comus” was written by Sir John Suckling, “Paradise Regained” by Lord Rochester, and “Samson Agonistes” by Elkanah Settle:  while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that Milton—­who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him—­owed his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact that he was the real author of Dryden’s “Astraea Redux.”]

In “Michaelmas Term” the realism of Middleton’s comic style is no longer alloyed or flavored with poetry or fancy.  It is an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humor.  Its successor, “A Trick to Catch the Old One,” is by far the best play Middleton had yet written, and one of the best he ever wrote.  The merit of this and his other good comedies does not indeed consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean creation or Jonsonian invention of humors or of men:  the spendthrifts and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed from the common stock of stage tradition:  it is the vivid variety of incident and intrigue, the freshness and ease and vigor of the style, the clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the action, that the reader finds most praiseworthy in the best comic work of such ready writers as Middleton and Dekker.  The dialogue has sometimes touches of real humor and flashes of genuine wit:  but its readable and enjoyable quality is generally independent of these.  Very witty writing may be very dreary reading, for want of natural animation and true dramatic movement:  and in these qualities at least the rough-and-ready work of our old dramatists is seldom if ever deficient.

It is, however, but too probable that the reader’s enjoyment may be crossed with a dash of exasperation when he finds a writer of real genius so reckless of fame and self-respect as the pressure of want or the weariness of overwork seems but too often and too naturally to have made too many of the great dramatic journeymen whose powers were half wasted or half worn out in the struggle for bare bread.  No other excuse than this can be advanced for the demerit of Middleton’s next comedy.  Had the author wished to show how well and how ill he could write at his worst and at his best, he could have given no fairer proof than by the publication of two plays issued under his name in the same year 1608.  “The Family of Love” is, in my judgment, unquestionably and incomparably