the worst of Middleton’s plays:  very coarse, very dull, altogether distasteful and ineffectual.  As a religious satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no impression of any definite folly or distinctive knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up by name to ridicule:  an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, concerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent and inoffensive in comparison with the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous and senseless license of our own day allows to run and roar about the country unmuzzled and unwhipped.

There is much more merit in the broad comedy of “Your Five Gallants,” a curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable for imitation.  The ingenious and humorous invention which supplies a centre for the picture and a pivot for the action is most singularly identical with the device of a modern detective as recorded by the greatest English writer of his day.  “The Butcher’s Story,” told to Dickens by the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective humor with the story of Fitsgrave—­a “thrice worthy” gentleman who under the disguise of a young gull fresh from college succeeds in circumventing and unmasking the five associated swindlers of variously villanous professions by whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered and befooled.  The play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous event.

The first of Middleton’s plays to attract notice from students of a later generation, “A Mad World, My Masters,” if not quite so thoroughly good a comedy as “A Trick to Catch the Old One,” must be allowed to contain the very best comic character ever drawn or sketched by the fertile and flowing pen of its author.  The prodigal grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress, is perhaps the most life-like figure of a good-humored and liberal old libertine that ever amused or scandalized a tolerant or intolerant reader.  The chief incidents of the action are admirably humorous and ingenious; but the matrimonial part of the catastrophe is something more than repulsive, and the singular intervention of a real live succubus, less terrible in her seductions than her sister of the “Contes Drolatiques,” can hardly seem happy or seasonable to a generation which knows not King James and his Demonology.

Of the two poets occasionally associated with Middleton in the composition of a play, Dekker seems usually to have taken in hand the greater part, and Rowley the lesser part, of the composite poem engendered by their joint efforts.  The style of “The Roaring Girl” is full of Dekker’s peculiar mannerisms; slipshod and straggling metre, incongruous touches or flashes of fanciful or lyrical expression, reckless and awkward inversions, irrational and irrepressible outbreaks of irregular and fitful rhyme.  And with all these faults it is more unmistakably the