The singular series of plays which covers much the same ground as Caxton’s immortal and delightful chronicle of the “Histories” of Troy may of course have been partially inspired by that most enchanting “recuyell”:  but Heywood, as will appear on collation or confrontation of the dramatist with the historian, must have found elsewhere the suggestion of some of his most effective episodes.  The excellent simplicity and vivacity of style, the archaic abruptness of action and presentation, are equally noticeable throughout all the twenty-five acts which lead us from the opening of the Golden to the close of the Iron Age; but there is a no less perceptible advance or increase of dramatic and poetic invention in the ten acts devoted to the tale of Troy and its sequel.  Not that there is anywhere any want of good simple spirited work, homely and lively and appropriate to the ambitious humility of the design; a design which aims at making popular and familiar to the citizens of Elizabethan London the whole cycle of heroic legend from the reign of Saturn to the death of Helen.  Jupiter, the young hero of the first two plays and ages, is a really brilliant and amusing mixture of Amadis, Sigurd, and Don Juan:  the pretty scene in which his infant life is spared and saved must be familiar, and pleasantly familiar, to all worthy lovers of Charles Lamb.  The verse underlined and immortalized by his admiration—­“For heaven’s sake, when you kill him, hurt him not”—­should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer.  I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals, could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism.  There is spirit of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of war and adventure that follow:  Heywood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn and the Titans very human and simple figures, whose doings and sufferings are presented with child-like straightforwardness in smooth and fluent verse and in dialogue which wants neither strength nor ease nor propriety.  The subsequent episode of Danae is treated with such frank and charming fusion of realism and romance as could only have been achieved in the age of Shakespeare.  To modern readers it may seem unfortunate for Heywood that a poet who never (to the deep and universal regret of all competent readers) followed up the dramatic promise of his youth, as displayed in the nobly vivid and pathetic little tragedy of “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” should in our day have handled the story of Danae and the story of Bellerophon so effectively as to make it impossible for the elder poet either to escape or to sustain comparison with the author