It is a pity that Heywood’s civic or professional devotion to the service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in the transfiguration of the idealized prentice:  it is a greater pity that we cannot exchange all Heywood’s extant masques for any one of the two hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he “had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger.”  The literary department of a Lord Mayor’s show can hardly be considered as belonging to literature, even when a poet’s time and trouble were misemployed in compiling the descriptive prose and the declamatory verse contributed to the ceremony.  Not indeed that it was a poet who devoted so much toil and good-will to celebration or elucidation of the laborious projects and objects both by water and land which then distinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs, pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas Brothers and their most ingenious parent were employed in a more honorable capacity than the subordinate function of versifier or showman—­an office combining the parts and the duties of the immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr. Shum.  Lexicographers might pick out of the text some rare if not unique Latinisms or barbarisms such as “prestigion” and “strage”:  but except for the purpose of such “harmless drudges” and perhaps of an occasional hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or Mark Twain.  And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood’s or Shakespeare’s time there is something comparatively not contemptible; the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a simple historic purity and dignity of its own; the dulness is not so dreary as the dulness of mediaeval prosers, the commonplace is not so vulgar as the commonplace of more modern scribes.

“The Trial of Chivalry” is a less extravagant example of homely romantic drama than “The Four Prentices of London.”  We owe to Mr. Bullen the rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and verification of its authorship.  In style and in spirit it is perfect Heywood:  simple and noble in emotion and conception, primitive and straightforward in construction and expression; inartistic but not ineffectual; humble and facile, but not futile or prosaic.  It is a rather more rational and natural piece of work than might have been expected from its author when equipped after the heroic fashion of Mallory or Froissart:  its date is more or less indistinctly indicated by occasional rhymes and peculiar conventionalities of diction:  and if Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may now and then suggest to his reader the figure of Sancho