Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared that “posterity is bound to take care” (an obligation, I fear, of a kind which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) “that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty” as that which induced Heywood to set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in the rascally interest of those “harlotry players” who thought it, forsooth, “against their peculiar profit to have them come in print.”  But I am not sure that it was altogether a noble or at all a rational modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt:  “It never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read.”  For, eight years after this well-known passage was in print, when publishing a “Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable passages of this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles,” he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, “an apologie of the Author” for slurring or skipping the record of her life and times in a curious passage which curiously omits as unworthy of mention his dramatic work on the subject, while complacently enumerating his certainly less valuable and memorable other tributes to the great queen’s fame as follows:  “To write largely of her troubles, being a princesse, or of her rare and remarkable Reigne after she was Queen, I should but feast you with dyet twice drest:  Having my selfe published a discourse of the first:  from her cradle to her crowne; and in another bearing Title of the nine worthy Women:  she being the last of the rest in time and place; though equall to any of the former both in religious vertue, and all masculine magnanimity.”  This surely looks but too much as though the dramatist and poet thought more of the chronicler and compiler than of the truer Heywood whose name is embalmed in the affection and admiration of his readers even to this day; as though the author of “A Challenge for Beauty,” “The Fair Maid of the West,” and “A Woman Killed with Kindness,” must have hoped and expected to be remembered rather as the author of “Troja Britannica,” “Gynaikeion,” “The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels,” and even this “Life of Merlin, sirnamed Ambrosius.  His Prophesies, and Predictions Interpreted; and their truth made good by our English Annalls”:  undoubtedly, we may believe, “a Subject never published in this kind before, and deserves” (sic) “to be knowne and observed by all men.”  Here follows the motto:  “Quotque aderant Vates, rebar adesse Deos.”  The biographer and chronographer would apparently have been less flattered than surprised to hear that he would be remembered rather as the creator of Frankford, Mountferrers, and Geraldine, than as the chronicler of King Brute, Queen Elizabeth, and King James.