The opening of “More Dissemblers Besides Women” is as full at once of comic and of romantic promise as the upshot of the whole is unsatisfactory—­a most lame and impotent conclusion.  But some of the dialogue is exquisite; full of flowing music and gentle grace, of ease and softness and fancy and spirit; and the part of a poetic or romantic Joseph Surface, as perfect in the praise of virtue as in the practice of vice, is one of Middleton’s really fine and happy inventions.  In the style of “The Widow” there is no less fluency and facility:  it is throughout identical with that of Middleton’s other comedies in metre; a style which has so many points in common with Fletcher’s as to make the apocryphal attribution of a share in this comedy to the hand of the greater poet more plausible than many other ascriptions of the kind.  I am inclined nevertheless to agree with Mr. Bullen’s apparent opinion that the whole credit of this brilliant play may be reasonably assigned to Middleton; and especially with his remark that the only scene in which any resemblance to the manner of Ben Jonson can be traced by the most determined ingenuity of critical research is more like the work of a pupil than like a hasty sketch of the master’s.  There is no lack of energetic invention and beautiful versification in another comedy of adventure and intrigue, “No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s”:  the unpleasant or extravagant quality of certain incidents in the story is partially neutralized or modified by the unfailing charm of a style worthy of Fletcher himself in his ripest and sweetest stage of poetic comedy.

But high above all the works yet mentioned there stands and will stand conspicuous while noble emotion and noble verse have honor among English readers the pathetic and heroic play so memorably appreciated by Charles Lamb, “A Fair Quarrel.”  It would be the vainest and emptiest impertinence to offer a word in echo of his priceless and imperishable praise.  The delicate nobility of the central conception on which the hero’s character depends for its full relief and development should be enough to efface all remembrance of any defect or default in moral taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of ethics, which may be detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet’s invention.  A man must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who cannot respond in spirit to that bitter cry of chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the shadow of a mother’s shame: 

                             Quench, my spirit,
   And out with honor’s naming lights within thee! 
   Be dark and dead to all respects of manhood! 
   I never shall have use of valor more.

Middleton has no second hero like Captain Ager:  but where is there another so thoroughly noble and lovable among all the characters of all the dramatists of his time but Shakespeare?