’There have been still farther ascribed to him:  1st.  The merry devil of Edmonton, a comedy in one act, printed in Dodsley’s old plays.  This has certainly some appearances in its favour.  It contains a merry landlord, who bears a great similarity to the one in the merry wives of Windsor.  However, at all events, though an ingenious, it is but a hasty sketch. 2nd.  The accusation of Paris. 3rd.  The birth of Merlin. 4th.  Edward the third. 5th.  The fair Emma. 6th.  MUCEDORUS. 7th.  Arden of FEVERSHAM.  I have never seen any of these, and cannot therefore say anything respecting them.  From the passages cited, I am led to conjecture that the subject of MUCEDORUS is the popular story of Valentine and Orson; a beautiful subject which Lope de Vega has also taken for a play.  Arden of FEVERSHAM is said to be a tragedy on the story of a man, from whom the poet was descended by the mother’s side.  If the quality of the piece is not too directly at variance with this claim, the circumstance would afford an additional probability in its favour.  For such motives were not foreign to Shakespeare:  he treated Henry the Seventh, who bestowed lands on his forefathers for services performed by them, with a visible partiality.

’Whoever takes from Shakespeare a play early ascribed to him, and confessedly belonging to his time, is unquestionably bound to answer, with some degree of probability, this question:  who has then written it?  Shakespeare’s competitors in the dramatic walk are pretty well known, and if those of them who have even acquired a considerable name, a Lilly, a Marlow, a Heywood, are still so very far below him, we can hardly imagine that the author of a work, which rises so high beyond theirs, would have remained unknown’—­ lectures on dramatic literature, vol. ii, page 252.

We agree to the truth of this last observation, but not to the justice of its application to some of the plays here mentioned.  It is true that Shakespeare’s best works are very superior to those of Marlow, or Heywood, but it is not true that the best of the doubtful plays above enumerated are superior or even equal to the best of theirs.  The Yorkshire tragedy, which Schlegel speaks of as an undoubted production of our author’s, is much more in the manner of Heywood than of Shakespeare.  The effect is indeed overpowering, but the mode of producing it is by no means poetical.  The praise which Schlegel gives to Thomas, lord Cromwell, and to sir John Oldcastle, is altogether exaggerated.  They are very indifferent compositions, which have not the slightest pretensions to rank with Henry V or Henry VIII.  We suspect that the German critic was not very well acquainted with the dramatic