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 tezan; 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 alk wance 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 Aikǹ pwvnévTwv, 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.

Middle Temple, November 1602. He found a cousin, John Ford, (the Fords were almost all Johns,) at Gray's Inn. No small advantage is it for a youth, on his first entrance at town or college, to have a kinsman or friend established just before him, old enough for a counseller, and not too old for a companion*. To the influence of John Ford, of Gray's Inn, it may perhaps be attributed, that John Ford, of the Middle Temple, stuck to his legal studies, and persevered in his profession, seemingly with good success, though we know not what was the peculiar nature of his professional engagements. He did not forget the obligation, but affectionately remembered his cousin, and is anxious to proclaim to the world, that he had not left his "calling for the idle tradet." As plays and masques were periodically represented by the Inns of Court, a young lawyer's becoming a writer of plays could be no indecorum: yet it was not in this line that Ford first appeared in print. He was early in the field. In 1606, in his eighteenth year, he published "Fame's Memorial," a tribute to the memory of Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, for by that title he is better and more honourably known, than by the earldom of Devonshire. It is dedicated to the Lady Penelope, the unhappy cause of the great Mountjoy's unhappiness. Ford speaks of himself as "a young stranger, totally unknown" to the lady, and probably to her lord also; but the sad

* The observation I owe to my late father, who often used to dwell on the advantage he derived from finding his fellow Christ's-boy Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, at Jesus College, Cambridge, and the loss he sustained at the departure of such a guide and example. experienced a similar loss at Oxford, the present Bishop of Barbadoes, though his rank in the university would have prohibited him from associating with a freshman who was not his kinsman.

"the

+ His dedications are tiresomely iterative upon this point. He calls "The Lover's Melancholy" frat fruits of his leisure,"-" 'Tis Pity, &c.," "the first fruits of his leisure," "-" The Lady's Trial," "the *e of less serious hours;" and he tells the Earl of Antrim, to whom he presented the "Fancies Chaste 1 Noble," that his "courtship of greatness never aimed at any thrift." So much the better; but what ww all this to the public or his patrons either?

Ford's dedications present a curious contrast to Massinger's in another respect. In all his dramas his language, when not obscured by vain emulation of Shakspeare's involution and superfœtation of thought, is as clear as the stars on a frosty night when there is no moon,-but in his prose addresses he is sometimes as laboriously unintelligible as if he would give the Sphynx a lesson-that might have saved her life-to secure her meaning from being guessed by having no meaning at all. Take a specimen : "As plurality hath reference to a multitude, so I care not to please many, but where there is a parity of condition, there the frees'un of construction makes the best music." Is not this curiosa infelicitas ?

He was the true conqueror

The life of this great man is the finest subject for biography now unoccupied. Ireland, the friendly rival of Essex,-the more his friend because he had been his rival; but that sad roy which makes some men martyrs,-and inflicts on others infinitive pains, far worse than martyrdom,— ed Mountjoy to the utmost. If he failed,―let him that has no sin throw the first stone. He loved the ter of Essex, and she loved him. But the Court of Wards interfered, and she was sold to Lord Rich. The Eural consequences followed. Yet neither Mountjoy nor the lady suffered in reputation, till they married. 1: dificult to calculate the issues of etiquette. Court morality, when it is at the best, (which probably was In the reign of Queen Charlotte,) was rather conventional at all times, so, as long as Lord Mountjoy (made Earl of Devonshire by James J.) suffered his connexion with Lady Rich to be a thing which everybody knew but ably was obliged to know, all went on well. The lady was received, and Mountjoy enjoyed the favour wch his public service had earned. The lady parted from the man who, taking her against her will, must deemed guilty of what the law justly punishes with death. Yet I say not that Mountjoy and she did right. Bræver bitter the cup of duty may be, duty commands us to drink it even to the dregs.

Land married them. King James said, "Ye have gotten a fair woman with a foul heart." I hope this vast trise. But Mountjoy felt it. He that might fairly have claimed the highest place among England's