just twenty-three years before.  The only figure equally prominent in either play is that of Thersites:  but Heywood, happily and wisely, has made no manner of attempt to rival or to reproduce the frightful figure of the intelligent Yahoo in which the sane and benignant genius of Shakespeare has for once anticipated and eclipsed the mad and malignant genius of Swift.  It should be needless to add that his Ulysses has as little of Shakespeare’s as of Homer’s:  and that the brutalization or degradation of the god-like figures of Ajax and Achilles is only less offensive in the lesser than in the greater poet’s work.  In the friendly duel between Hector and Ajax the very text of Shakespeare is followed with exceptional and almost servile fidelity:  but the subsequent exchange of gifts is, of course, introduced in imitation of earlier and classic models.  The contest of Ajax and Ulysses is neatly and spiritedly cast into dramatic form:  Ovid, of course, remains unequalled, as he who runs may read in Dryden’s grand translation, but Heywood has done better—­to my mind at least—­than Shirley was to do in the next generation; though it is to be noted that Shirley has retained more of the magnificent original than did his immediate precursor:  but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a burlesque to pass muster even as a blasphemous travestie of the sacred text of Sophocles.  In the fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope with no such matchless models or precursors; and it is perhaps the brightest and most interesting of the five.  Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing understudy of Thersites:  his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of the typical traitress; and though time and space are wanting for the development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its simple fashion:  the complicated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.

In “Love’s Mistress; or, The Queen’s Masque,” the stage chronicler or historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet:  his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity and spirit, simplicity and vivacity.  The framework or setting of these five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue:  the story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Moliere and Corneille; though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless Theophile’s.  The fortunes of Psyche in English poetry have been as curious and various