tist could look for; and Massinger took the occasion to express his vexation in an occasional prologue, as follows:

sermon-days during Lent.

As ever, sir, you lent a gracious ear

To oppressed innocence, now vouchsafe to hear

A short petition. At your feet, in me
The poet kneels, and to your Majesty
Appeals for justice. What we now present,
When first conceived, in his vote and intent

How came it that Laud did not remonstrate against acts, which, whether criminal or not, were certainly mali exempli, and superfluously unpopular? Perhaps he did-and was disregarded ; perhaps his devotion to the king, as head of the church, closed his lips. Yet St. Ambrose did not scruple to put an emperor to open penance. Loyalty is the bounden duty of a Christian, but ultra-royalism is the Achillesheel of the Church of England, which has suffered more by the reign of Charles I1. than by the temporary domination of its enemies. Sir Henry Herbert, who knew well enough who was at the bottom of the Lent business, refused ten pounds from the French players "because he wished to render the Queen, his mistress, an acceptable service." Yet he made Massinger pay twenty shillings for a play he would not permit to be performed.-Sneak!

Queen Henrietta paid Massinger a more unusual compliment than ordering his plays at court. She attended the performance of his "Cleander" (a lost tragedy), at the Blackfriars' Theatre. Considering what theatres then were, when the young gallants were in the habit of displaying their bravery and tobacco pipes on stools upon the stage (a nuisance which Charles II. thought necessary to abate by an order in council), and when there were twopenny rooms where ale and tobacco were sold, I cannot think this a very queenly or prudent condescension. On another occasion, February, 1636, when Davenant's "Triumphs of the Prince d'Amour" was presented at the Middle Temple, the daughter of Henri Quatre with her ladies sat on the platform with the promiscuous assemblage, in the dress of citizens' wives, then far more distinct from court habiliments than at present. Charles should not have permitted these vagaries. Unseemly condescension never atones for habitual hauteur: and unpopular personages, by hunting popularity, only add contempt to hatred. Popular characters, while their day lasts, may do anything; their vices are only proofs of a good heart; their illhumours are dulces Amaryllidis iræ—pretty Fanny's way—their grossest absurdity is perfume in the public nostrils.

Decipiunt cæcum vitia, aut etiam hæc
Delectant, veluti Balbinum polypus Agnæ.

But every man that squinted was not a Wilkes, even in the heyday of Wilkes and liberty. Kemble's cough and Kean's "damnable faces" were only admired in Kemble and Kean. Desdemona might not have fancied Ignatius Sancho, though she fell in love with Othello. The very peculiarities, which as symbols of individuality, serve as pegs for love to hang upon, are just as liable to arrest the burs of hatred. Every one must have felt this in their own case. A lisp a stammer—a provincial accent-a cast of the eye-un petit nez retroussé, how amiable in the amiable,—in the disagreeable how odious.

A popular person can do nothing wrong: an unpopular person, especially if of high rank, can do nothing right. The French never affected puritanical rigour. Yet the levities into which Marie Antoinette was seduced by the over-confidence of virtue, were served up as a bonne-bouche for jacobin malice. But what with the common unthinking vulgar is merely prejudice, becomes deadly rancour when vulgarity is intensified by fanaticism. Poor Henrietta and her royal husband were sorely mistaken if they thought that by publicity and splendour they could appease a hatred which had usurped the throne of duty.

I know not whether Massinger received any pecuniary bounty from the king beyond the customary honorarium, which he might share with the players. Charles gave Cartwright forty pounds for his "Royal Slave," perhaps from some mysterious presentiment connected with the name. His interest in theatricals was more than consistent with the gravity of his character. He furnished Shirley with the plot of his "Gamester," and desired Sir H. Herbert to inform him that it was the best play he had seen for seven years. I like Charles all the better for these things, but the puritans did not. His expenses in masques and pageants would have paid and armed many loyal soldiers, and perhaps might have bought off a patriot or two.

Was sacred to your pleasure, in each part
With his best of fancy, judgment, language, art,
Fashioned and formed so as might well and may
Deserve a welcome, and no vulgar way.

He durst not, sir, at such a solemn feast,
Lard his grave matter with one scurrilous jest ;
But laboured that no passage might appear

But what the Queen without a blush might hear,
And yet this poor work suffered by the rage
And envy of some Catos of the stage.

Yet still he hopes this play, which then was seen,

With sore eyes, and condemned out of their spleen,

May be by you, the supreme judge, set free

And raised above the reach of calumny.

I know not what Queen Henrietta did and did not blush at, but certainly I would not undertake to read the "Emperor of the East" in the presence of female majesty, without considerable curtailment, and the entire excision of the prose part of the fourth scene of the fourth act, in which the author (not Massinger, who never wrote prose), for the sake of a scurrilous jest, has committed a medical anachronism. But surely Massinger could have no right, after authorising this prologue, to reflect on Ben.

With this doubtful exception, our author seems to have lived on good terms with all his brethren. No line in his plays could annoy any writer-living or dead—which is more than can be said for Shakspeare, who was rather prone to parody. Shirley, Ford, May, Goff (in a Latin epigram which would puzzle Martial, and break Priscian's heart), George Donne (whom Mr. Weber innocently confounded with Dr. John Donne), and a cortege of Jays, and J. B.'s, and J. T.'s, heralded his plays, like the dwarf before the giant, with commendatory verses, which it is well to accept as testimonies of friendship-for assuredly they are good for nothing else.

His dedications are beautiful samples of pure mother English, commendable for a self-respectful respectfulness, very different from the presumptuous adulation of Dryden and Young, but painful from their weary iteration of complaint and acknowledgment

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning;

Alas! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.-WORDSWORTH.

Complaint seems to have become habitual to him, like the sickly tone of a confirmed valetudinarian, who thinks you unfeeling if you tell him he is looking well. We are accustomed to hear of the peaceful days of Charles, as days when the sister Muses sang together in the warm light of a Christian Phoebus. Yet Massinger continually talks of his "despised quality," and addresses each successive dedicatee as his sole and last hope. Gifford says, "all Massinger's patrons were persons of worth and consideration." He never degraded himself, like poor Otway, by dedicating to a titled courtezan; but his principal patron, Philip of Pembroke and Montgomery, has left a stain upon the name of Herbert which no dedication can wash away. His ignorance

and cowardice have, no doubt, been much exaggerated; but of his brutality, meanness, and ingratitude, there can be no doubt at all.

The only undramatic poem (if so it may be called) of any length that Massinger has left, memorializes the death of this nobleman's eldest son, who died at Florence, January, 1636. It might as well be forgotten-if it were not for one passage, curious as illustrating the customs of the age.

That great ladies mourn

His sudden death, and lords vie at his urn

Drops of compassion; that true sorrow fed

With showers of tears, still bathes the widowed bed
Of his dear spouse.—

Now this "dear spouse" had never been, in any rational or Christian sense, a wife at all. Charles Lord Herbert was married (if the profane abuse of a holy ceremony can constitute marriage) to Mary, daughter of Villiers Duke of Buckingham, 1634, when the poor little girl was so young, that it was expedient the bridegroom should immediately set out on his travels. Providence employed the small-pox to disappoint the avarice or ambition of the match-makers. Had this young couple arrived at nubile years, would either of them have been bound in conscience to stand to the bargain?

Is it not lamentable to see a man like Massinger, whom we would preserve in everlasting remembrance, constrained to write nonsense for a poor pittance from one who deserved not the impunity of oblivion?

Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se

Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.-JUVENAL, iii. 152.

The woes of poverty might well be borne,

Were not the poor compelled to merit scorn.

Massinger did feel, painfully feel his humiliation. The degradation of patronage ate into his soul. It is good to be dependent, where the dependency grows out of natural relation, or constituted order. But to sue for dependence;-to court the bondage of obligation, as it is a sore evil for any man, so for the highly-gifted and high-minded it is worse than pauperism. Literature is a bad trade; but it is better to pursue it as a trade, than calculate upon the bounty of great ones, which is only honourable when "it droppeth as the gracious dew from heaven." To inward disquietude, and a desire to utter in falsetto what his poverty forbade him to speak in his natural tones, rather than to any sincere sympathy with the nascent republicanism of his age, we must ascribe the angry dislike of kings, and courts, and ministers, which is so obtrusive in Massinger's plays, and the unnecessary,-unpoetical baseness of many of his characters. His political sentiments, abstractedly considered, are, for the most part, just; but they are thrust in head and shoulders, where there is no dramatic call for them. He could not get fairly out of England-not the grand ancestral England of imaginative patriotism -but the factious, quarrelsome, half-servile, half-rebellious England of his own day. He felt the manacles about him,

And dragged, at each remove, a lengthening chain.

His political allusions sometimes brought him into trouble; and if King Charles had not been more liberal than Sir Henry (who did little more credit to the name of Herbert than his kinsman Philip), he might have suffered more severely. On the 11th January, 1631, the Master of the Revels refused to license a play of his, the name of which has not transpired, "because it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal by Philip II., there being peace sworn between England and Spain. I had my fee notwithstanding, which belongs to me for reading it over, and ought always to be brought with a book." So far Sir Henry, who seems to have been a mighty gnat-strainer, and a bit of a puritan, who reconciled his conscience to the profane employment of reading and allowing plays, by exacting the uttermost farthing from poet and player-holding with his fellow-creature in Sheffield's Session,

Though the function was wicked-the salary was good.

Now mark the difference between a Jack in office and a generous King. In 1638, when the dispute ran high about ship-money, Massinger produced a play on the history of Don Pedro the Cruel, called "The King and Subject," in which occurred the following passage:—

Monies? We'll raise supplies which ways we please,

And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which

We'll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars

In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws

But what their swords did ratify; the wives

And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their wills as deities, &c.

"This is a piece taken out of Philip Massinger's play, called the King and the Subject, and entered here for ever, to be remembered by my son, and those that cast their eyes upon it, in honour of king Charles my master, who reading over the play at Newmarket, set his mark upon the place with his own hand, and in these words:'This is too insolent, and to be changed.' Note, that the poet makes it the speech of a king, Don Pedro, king of Spain, and spoken to his subjects."-Register of Master of Revels.

Now there can be little doubt, that by Don Pedro Massinger meant King Charles, and more than insinuated that the liberty taken with the people's purse would be extended to their wives and daughters; and had Charles not chanced to read the play at Newmarket, ten to one Sir Henry would have dealt with Don Pedro as he did with Don Sebastian, pocketed his fee, and left the poet his pains for his labour. But the king was content to set his mark over the obnoxious passage, and gave his special allowance to the writer who had gone out of the way for a clap-trap at his expense. In the same register we read :—

"At Greenwich, the 4th of June. Mr. W. Murray gave me power from the king to allow of the play, and told me that he would warrant it.”

Sir Henry informs us that the name of the play was altered. Mr. Malone conjectures that it was the "Tyrant" before mentioned; but I do not see how that could mend the matter. It was acted June 5, 1638, but never printed, and has not been

found. The subject has great dramatic capabilities; but I doubt whether Massinger would treat it worthily either of the theme, or of himself. Neither Tragedy nor Comedy, in the strictest force of the terms, was his province. Besides, he had an unlucky habit of getting into a passion with his bad characters, and making them wilful demonstrators of their own depravity. Smollett, particularly in his Count Fathom, falls into this mistake. Euripides was not free from it. It nowhere occurs in Homer, Cervantes, or Shakspeare, the great and true dramatists, and very seldom in Fielding or Sir Walter Scott.

Massinger's excellence-a great and beautiful excellence it is-was in the expression of virtue, in its probation, its strife, its victory. He could not, like Shakspeare, invest the perverted will with the terrors of a magnificent intellect, or bestow the cestus of poetry on simple unconscious loveliness.

We draw to a close. After "The King and Subject," so happy in its timely expurgation, Massinger produced two dramas, "Alexius, or the Chaste Lover," and "The Fair Anchoress of Pausilippo." It is a pity they are both lost, for the titles promise much in his best way. The last was acted in January, 1640. On the 16th March in the same year, he went to bed in apparent health, and was found dead in the morning in his house on the Bankside. Such is the received account; but he seems to have had none to care for him, none to mark his symptoms, or to detect the slow decay which he might conceal in despair of sympathy.

Poorly, poor man, he lived-poorly, poor man, he died.

He was buried in the churchyard of St. Saviour's, and the comedians were his only mourners-perhaps half envious of his escape from the storm that was already grumbling afar, and sending ahead its herald billows. No stone marked his neglected resting-place, but in the parish register appears this brief memorial, “ March 20, 163940-buried Philip Massinger, a STRANGER." His sepulchre was like his life, obscure: like the nightingale, he sung darkling-it is to be feared, like the nightingale of the fable, with his breast against a thorn.

JOHN FORD was descended from a family long settled in the north of Devonshire. Those who have an opportunity of consulting Prince's "Worthies of Devon," may find a great deal about his genealogy, but little or nothing about himself. Suffice it to say, that Thomas Ford, of Ilsington, married the sister or daughter "of the famous Lord Chief Justice Popham, and had issue John the Poet and several others." John the Poet was baptized in Ilsington church, 17th April, 1586, and became a member of the

Lucian wrote a whimsical piece called Akh pwvnéνTwv, the lawsuit of the bowels. The letter E, might find ground for litigation in the names of Shakspear or Shakespeare, Massinger or Messenger, and Ford or Forde. I am not aware that any autograph of the last has been discovered; but the anagram, Fide Honor, seen in the title-pages of some of his plays, pleads for the final E. I doubt, however, if anagrams are legal evidence in these cases; and the matter is not worth contesting, as this anagram is no way significant or præfigurative, like some which Camden has collected. The most extraordinary instance of anagrammatical prophecy that I remember, is that of Horatio Nelson,-Honor est a Nilo. The Cabala cannot equal it.