inent faults are evident. On Bianca, the most conspicuous female character, not a little false sentiment is wasted. Though not in act a traitor to her husband, she certainly is so at heart, yet toward the close of the play she is spoken of as living "a life of innocence and beauty." The whole situation is inconceivable. A woman, at first represented as deeply attached to her husband, suddenly and without apparent reason is seized with a violent infatuation for another. The other, up to this moment fervent and ardent in the protestations of his passion, is all at once as "chaste as ice." The husband's jealousy is basely aroused, and a sanguinary sequel is the result. Not only is the main thread of this play exceedingly ill-woven, but the tangled underplot, in which Ford is rarely fortunate, is here more than usually lacking in refinement. Perkin Warbeck, Ford's one history or chronicle play, stands easily second to The Broken Heart in clearness of outline, carefulness of detail, and completeness of general conception. It is one of the few dramas of its class that will bear comparison with Shakespere's matchless transcripts from the actual life of the past. The hero is the best male character we have from Ford's pen. Whatever the young pretender to the English throne may really have been, we behold, in the dramatist's portrait of him, a noble youth of single purpose, who believes implicity in his right to the crown, and who goes to his death maintaining that right. There is no inconsistency in the poet's picture. Warbeck enlists our sympathies at the outset, and our interest in him never flags through all his vicissitudes until he gives up his life on Tower Hill. We are not surprised that the charming Lady Katherine listens so readily to his avowals, for in him appear to be united the gallantry of the lover, the dignity of the rightful sovereign, and the tenderness and valiant manliness of the true gentleman. Here, too, as in Ford's masterpiece, the lesser characters are well defined—the just and genial Huntley, the leal and brave Daryell, the vacillating Scotch monarch, all, in fact, show the same painstaking execution. This is a canvas whose minor, as well as whose major, figures will bear the closest scrutiny. Of Ford's three romantic comedies The Lover's Melancholy is clearly the best; and while the play is by no means a strong one, there is much about it that is singularly attractive. In spite of the slight reminiscences it betrays of Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, there is but little exaggeration in the statement that here Ford has met and equaled his brother dramatists in their own chosen field. It would seem as though the poet had deliberately, at times, retarded the rapid development of the plot in order to beautify the story. Nowhere else does Ford give a hint of what he might have accomplished had he attempted narrative verse writing. His apparently keen sense of the romantic surprises us; not so, however, his touches of pathos, though these are of a far softer and less harrowing nature than in The Broken Heart. Insanity was something that most of the Elizabethans from Kyd downward were fond of attempting to portray, and sorry work many of them made of it. Ford can hardly be said to approach Shakespere in this particular, or possibly even Webster in that notable scene in The White Devil (Cornelia at the bier of Marcello), but Penthea demented is not so far removed from Ophelia, and old Meleander in The Lover's Melancholy, with mind unbalanced through grief at the supposed death of his favorite daughter, is vastly above the ordinary stage madman. The chief male characters in this play lack stamina, and are little better than lackadaisical, moon-struck lovers. Ford's genius was not of the masculine type like that of Massinger. Except Perkin Warbeck, and a few others, his men are either coxcombs or weaklings, somehow wanting in strong moral force. It is in the delineation of the female character that we find Ford in his element. His knowledge of the motives, the springs of action, that move the feminine heart was both deep and intimate. Among the most attractive of his women are the sisters Eroclea and Cleophila in The Lover's Melancholy. Neither, strictly speaking, is of the heroic mold, but both are thoroughly natural and charming. Eroclea, in spite of her youth's disguise and her assumed mannishness, is naïve and fascinating, with a dash of real bravery, while Cleophila's devotion to her insane father is especially touching. A different quality of devotion, and one that excites our admiration more keenly, is that shown by Katherine Gordon to her husband, Perkin Warbeck. Whatever the world may say of him, her belief in his truth and honor is not to be shaken, and he goes to his execution strengthened by her loving faith. Penthea's patient endurance and Calantha's sublime stoicism combine to make "a monument of sorrows" that has few counterparts on the pages of tragedy. Arabella, despite the terrible character of her guilt, moves to pity, and even in Bianca, Ford's one signal failure in his portrayal of femineity, when we have once accepted the impossible change that comes over her, there is something finely daring. It is a misguided heroism which leads her to tell her husband to his face that, while she is true to him, she holds Fernando infinitely above him as a man, but it is heroism nevertheless. To the gallery of Ford's heroines two others might be added, Spinella from The Lady's Trial and Castamela from Fancies Chaste and Noble, characters whose purity and charm serve to relieve the dullness of two poorly constructed and otherwise objectionable plays. Ford's conception of woman was upon a vastly higher plane than the view taken of her by his contemporaries, and it is only in the pages of Shakespere that we meet with braver, more refined, and loftier types. Gifford's characterization of Ford's humor as 66 a dull medley of extravagance and impurity" is not inapt. Surely poet never wrote who lacked to a greater degree the true sense of the humorous, yet who persisted in introducing characters intended to be comic. In some of the plays the alleged comicalities are not offensive, as in the case of the rival lovers, Guzman and Fulgoso, in The Lady's Trial. Their fun consists in strutting both with legs and tongue, and in berating one another most roundly when they can find no one else to abuse. Too often, however, inoffensive is a term that cannot be applied to Ford's intended pleasantries. The dramatist who could end the death agonies of several of his most prominent characters with a long drawn out "0-0" must have been quite as sadly lacking in the sense of the ridiculous as the noted seer and singer who wrote: Only the ass with motion dull Turned round his long left ear." Ford's diction is uniformly felicitous. Unless it be Beaumont and Fletcher, no dramatists of his day have a greater grace of phrase. He caught from Shakespere, perhaps, the art of vivifying a whole paragraph by a single daring metaphor or verbal transposition, erring sometimes in taste, to be sure, but generally effecting his end. Even into the mouths of some of his most senseless comic characters he occasionally puts such happy turns of expression as these: "Her fair eyes Like to a pair of pointed beams drawn from A temple from whence oracles proceed Ford's rendering of the classical legend of the musical strife between the nightingale and the musician, introduced into the first act of The Lover's Melancholy, will further serve to illustrate the rare |