to a superhuman and infallible intelligence—­than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or poetic point of view.  The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have been to invent, to devise, to create; not to modify, to adapt, to adjust.  Bloody Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and poetic malefactress:  but only by the most audacious and magnificent defiance of history and possibility.  Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia (to use the proper ceremonial style adopted for the exquisitely tender and graceful dedication of the “Asolani”) died peaceably in the odor of incense offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin verse of such accomplished poets and acolytes as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi.  Nothing more tragic or dramatic could have been made of her peaceful and honorable end than of the reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history.  The greatest poet and dramatist of the nineteenth century has chosen to immortalize them by violence—­to give them a life, or to give a life to their names, which history could not give.  Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the creation of a living and eternal truth.  One thing may be registered to the credit, not indeed of the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the man and the Englishman:  the generous fair play shown to Philip II. in the scene which records his impartial justice done upon the Spanish assassin of an English victim.  There is a characteristic manliness about Heywood’s patriotism which gives a certain adventitious interest to his thinnest or homeliest work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a quality.  In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play:  which is indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or even an irregular historical drama.  Again the trusty cockney poet has made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman:  and has made of him at once a really noble and a heartily amusing figure.  His better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman d’Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap; though in the earlier passages of Parisian trickery and buffoonery there is a note of broad humor which may remind us of Moliere—­not of course the Moliere of Tartuffe, but the Moliere of M. de Pourceaugnac.  The curious alterations made in later versions of the closing scene are sometimes though not generally for the better.