harmony and beauty of diction of which he was capable : "One morning early This accident encountered me: I heard A sound of music touched my ears, or rather This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute, Nature's best-skilled musician, undertakes The challenge, and for every several strain The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own : Upon his quaking instrument than she, The nightingale, did with her various notes Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last Into a pretty anger, that a bird, Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, or notes, Should vie with him for mastery, whose study So many voluntaries and so quick, That there was curiosity and cunning, Concord in discord, lines of differing method The bird, ordained to be Music's first martyr, strove to imitate These several sounds; which when her warbling throat And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness, To see the conqueror upon her hearse To weep a funeral elegy of tears; He looked upon the trophies of his art, Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood, Though Winstanley states that Ford's plays were profitable to the managers of the theaters where they were produced, it is difficult to believe that he was ever a popular writer. In the garden of his fancy he cultivated too many mournful blossoms, the rue, the night-shade, and the "Amaranth, flower of Death." The ways of sorrow he made his own, and the children of grief were his familiars. Where the forest shades of woe were deepest the sound of that delicate instrument, his lute, was natural, plaintive, melancholy, pity-evoking, but in the mirthful sunlight it was too often strained and out of tune. We can but think of Ford's muse as of one sad-eyed and lorn, "Like Niobe, all tears." Touching at certain points, now Shakespere, now Marston, now Beaumont and Fletcher, and most resembling the gloom-enshrouded Webster in the bent of his genius, he yet stands apart from them all, an isolated figure, wrapped in the mantle of his darkly contemplative temperament. Thou cheat'st us, Ford: mak'st one seem two by art : RICHARD CRASHAW. PROLOGUE. OUR scene is Sparta. He whose best of art 5 When innocence and sweetness crowned their lays; Then vices gasped for breath, whose whole com mérce Was whipped to exile by unblushing verse. II This law we keep in our presentment now, Not to take freedom more than we allow ; 16 What may be here thought Fiction, when Time's youth |