The splendid slovens who served their audience with spiritual work in which the gods had mixed “so much of earth, so much of heaven, and such impetuous blood”—­the generous and headlong purveyors who lavished on their daily provision of dramatic fare such wealth of fine material and such prodigality of superfluous grace—­the foremost followers of Marlowe and of Shakespeare were too prone to follow the impetuous example of the first rather than the severe example of the second.  There is perhaps not one of them—­and Middleton assuredly is not one—­whom we can reasonably imagine capable of the patience and self-respect which induced Shakespeare to rewrite the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, of Falstaff, and of Hamlet with an eye to the literary perfection and permanence of work which in its first light outline had won the crowning suffrage of immediate or spectacular applause.

The rough-and-ready hand of Rowley may be traced, not indeed in the more high-toned passages, but in many of the most animated scenes of “The Spanish Gipsy.”  In the most remarkable of the ten masks or interludes which appear among the collected works of Middleton the two names are again associated.  To the freshness, liveliness, and spirited ingenuity of this little allegorical comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in his excellent critical introduction.  “The Inner-Temple Masque,” less elaborate than “The World Tost at Tennis,” shows no lack of homely humor and invention:  and in the others there is as much waste of fine flowing verse and facile fancy as ever excited the rational regret of a modern reader at the reckless profusion of literary power which the great poets of the time were content to lavish on the decoration or exposition of an ephemeral pageant.  Of Middleton’s other minor works, apocryphal or genuine, I will only say that his authorship of “Microcynicon”—­a dull and crabbed imitation of Marston’s worst work as a satirist—­seems to me utterly incredible.  A lucid and melodious fluency of style is the mark of all his metrical writing; and this stupid piece of obscure and clumsy jargon could have been the work of no man endowed with more faculty of expression than informs or modulates the whine of an average pig.  Nor is it rationally conceivable that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some reams of paper with what he was pleased to consider or to call a paraphrase of the “Wisdom of Solomon” can have had anything but a poet’s name in common with a poet.  This name is not like that of the great writer whose name is attached to “The Transformed Metamorphosis”:  there can hardly have been two Cyril Tourneurs in the field, but there may well have been half a dozen Thomas Middletons.  And Tourneur’s abortive attempt at allegoric discourse is but a preposterous freak of prolonged eccentricity:  this paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable sea of limitless and inexhaustible drivel.  There are three reasons—­two of them considerable, but the third conclusive—­for