of “The Earthly Paradise”; but the most appreciative admirers of Morris will not be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to the admirable qualities displayed in Heywood’s dramatic treatment of these legends.  The naturally sweet and spontaneous delicacy of the later poet must not be looked for in the homely and audacious realism of Heywood; in whose work the style of the Knight’s Tale and the style of the Miller’s Tale run side by side and hand in hand.

From the Golden Age to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood’s dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation or degradation of the classical four ages.  “The Golden Age” is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; in “The Silver Age” the process of evolution is already visible at work.  Bellerophon and Aurea cannot certainly be compared with the Joseph and Phraxanor of Charles Wells:  but the curt and abrupt scene in which they are hastily thrust on the stage and as hastily swept off it is excellently composed and written.  The highest possible tribute to the simple and splendid genius of Plautus is paid by the evidence of the fact that all his imitators have been obliged to follow so closely on the lines of his supernatural, poetical, and farcical comedy of Amphitryon.  Heywood, Rotrou, Moliere, and Dryden have sat at his feet and copied from his dictation like school-boys.  The French pupils, it must be admitted, have profited better and shown themselves apter and happier disciples than the English.  I cannot think that even Moliere has improved on the text of Rotrou as much, or nearly as much, as he has placed himself under unacknowledged obligation to his elder countryman:  but in Dryden’s version there is a taint of greasy vulgarity, a reek of obtrusive ruffianism, from which Heywood’s version is as clean as Shakespeare’s could have been, had he bestowed on the “Amphitruo” the honor he conferred on the “Menaechmi.”  The power of condensation into a few compact scenes of material sufficient for five full acts is a remarkable and admirable gift of Heywood’s.

After the really dramatic episode in which he had the advantage of guidance by the laughing light of a greater comic genius than his own, Heywood contentedly resumes the simple task of arranging for the stage a mythological chronicle of miscellaneous adventure.  The jealousy of Juno is naturally the mainspring of the action and the motive which affords some show of connection or coherence to the three remaining acts of “The Silver Age”:  the rape of Proserpine, the mourning and wandering and wrath of Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale.  Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle.  The second of the five plays composing it closes with the rescue of Proserpine by Hercules, and the judgment of Jupiter on “the Arraignment of the Moon.”