as her adventures on earth and elsewhere.  Besides and since this pretty little play of Heywood’s, she has inspired a long narrative poem by Marmion, one of the most brilliant and independent of the younger comic writers who sat at the feet or gathered round the shrine of Ben Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutchman’s poet laureate, than which nothing more portentous in platitude ever crawled into print, and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wooden verse evoked from Shadwell’s great predecessor in the office of court rhymester an immortalizing reference to “Prince Nicander’s vein”; a magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty example of metrical romance by Morris.

“Inexplicable and eccentric as were the moods and fashions of dramatic poetry in an age when Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything so singular in its composition and so mysterious in its motive as ’Troilus and Cressida,’ the most eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or perhaps of any time, is probably ‘The Rape of Lucrece.’” This may naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the party-colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed and checkered with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce.  But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than classical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or essentially to the third rather than to the second of the four sections into which Heywood’s existing plays may be exhaustively divided, which stands on the verge between them with something of the quaintest and most graceful attributes of either.  The fine instinct and the simple skill with which the poet has tempered the villany of his villains without toning down their atrocities by the alloy of any incongruous quality must be acknowledged as worthily characteristic of a writer who at his ethical best might be defined as something of a plebeian Sidney.  There are touches of criminal heroism and redeeming humanity even in the parts of Sextus and Tullia:  the fearless desperation of the doomed ravisher, the conjugal devotion of the hunted parricide, give to the last defiant agony of the abominable mother and son a momentary tone of almost chivalrous dignity.  The blank verse is excellent, though still considerably alloyed with rhyme:  a fusion or alternation of metrical effects in which the young Heywood was no less skilful and successful, inartistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success may seem to modern criticism, than the young Shakespeare.