From critics or students who regard with an academic smile of cultivated contempt the love for their country or the faith in its greatness which distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet whose devotion to his homestead was not merely that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner, no less fond and proud of his city than of his country.  The quaint, homely, single-hearted municipal loyalty of an old-world burgess, conscious of his station as “a citizen of no mean city,” and proud even of the insults which provincials might fling at him as a cockney or aristocrats as a tradesman, is so admirably and so simply expressed in the person of Heywood’s first hero—­the first in date, at all events, with whom a modern reader can hope to make acquaintance—­that the nobly plebeian pride of the city poet is as unmistakably personal as the tenderness of the dramatic artist who has made the last night of the little princes in the Tower as terribly and pathetically real for the reader as Millais has made it for the spectator of the imminent tragedy.  Why Shakespeare shrank from the presentation of it, and left to a humbler hand the tragic weight of a subject so charged with tenderness and terror, it might seem impertinent or impossible to conjecture—­except to those who can perceive and appreciate the intense and sensitive love of children which may haply have made the task distasteful if not intolerable:  but it is certain that even he could hardly have made the last words of the little fellows more touchingly and sweetly lifelike.

Were there nothing further to commend in the two parts of the historical play or chronicle history of “King Edward IV.,” this would suffice to show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was not unjustified of its early and perilous venture:  but the hero of these two plays is no royal or noble personage, he is plain Matthew Shore the goldsmith.  We find ourselves at once in what Coleridge would have called the anachronic atmosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a champion cockney, whose interest is really much less in the rise and fall of princes than in the homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy gallantry of their apprentices.  The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity:  the homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date and of the class to which these plays must be referred.  The parts of the rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce.  The peculiar powers of Heywood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were still in abeyance or in embryo.  Pathos there is of a true and manly kind in the leading part of Shore; but it has little or nothing of the poignant and intense tenderness with which Heywood