The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of Heywood’s work which with all their great and real merit have least in them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of his genius:  those qualities of which when we think of him we think first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most naturally associate with his name.  As a historical or mythological playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the sweet-tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of Lamb:  something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something of his humor:  but if this were all we had of him we should know comparatively little of what we now most prize in him.  Of this we find most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day:  but there is more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories or his legendary complications and variations on the antique.  The famous and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading “The Four Prentices of London.”  Externally the most extravagant and grotesque of dramatic poems, this eccentric tragicomedy of chivalrous adventure is full of poetic as well as fantastic interest.  There is really something of discrimination in the roughly and readily sketched characters of the four crusading brothers:  the youngest especially is a life-like model of restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when incarnate in a hot-headed English boy; unlike even in its likeness to the same type as embodied in a French youngster such as the immortal d’Artagnan.  Justice has been done by Lamb, and consequently as well as subsequently by later criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which breaks out by flashes in this quixotic romance of the City, with its serio-comic ideal of crusading counter-jumpers:  but it has never to my knowledge been observed that in the scene “where they toss their pikes so,” which aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood, the future object of Dryden’s ignorant and pointless insult, anticipated with absolute exactitude the style of Dryden’s own tragic blusterers when most busily bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean epigram.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue in “Tyrannic Love” or “The Conquest of Granada”: 

   “Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play? 
    Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey.”

   “Rapier and pike this combat shall decide: 
    Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride.”

   “I’ll teach thee:  thou shalt like my zany be,
    And feign to do my cunning after me.”

This will remind the reader not so much of the “Rehearsal” as of Butler’s infinitely superior parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and Puss.]