which binds the seraph to the corpse can be easily severed.

Massinger's most powerful male characters are Sforza, in The Duke of Milan, Sir Giles' Overreach, in the New Way to pay Old Debts, and Luke, in The City Madam. The second of these still keeps the stage, and the third sometimes appears in a modern version, called Riches. Luke is a fine villain, forcibly conceived and strongly sustained.

JOHN FORD, a scholar and gentleman, occupies a prominent place in English dramatic literature, as a poet of pathos and sentiment. His most splendid successes are in the handling of subjects which are, in themselves, unwritten tragedies, - the deepest distresses of the heart and the terrible aberrations of the passions. His works make a sad, deep, and abiding impression on the mind, though hardly one that is pleasing or healthy. He had little of that stalwart strength of mind, and heedless daring, which characterize the earlier dramatists.. Like Massinger, he is deficient in wit and humor, and like Massinger resorts to dull indecencies as substitutes. His sentiment is soft, rich, and sensuous, informed by a mild, melancholy heroism, often inexpressibly touching, and expressed in a fine, fluent diction, which melts into the mind like music. The celebrated contention of a bird and a musician, described in The Lover's Melancholy, is a specimen of his grace and sweetness of mind. In Lamb's opinion, it almost equals the strife it celebrates.

Lamb, in a note to the last scene of The Broken Heart, ranks Ford in the first order of poets. "He sought for sublimity," he says, "not by parcels, in metaphors and visible images, but directly, where she has

scenes.

her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds." We do not think this is the impression that his works make as a whole; it is true only of the high-wrought grandeur of detached Ford, in manners and character, seems to have been, like Jacques, melancholy and gentleman-like. Little is known regarding his life. He is supposed to have been a lawyer, and seems to have had a dislike to the reputation of a dramatist, in so far as it confounded him with those who were authors by profession; for, as Dr. Farmer says in reference to Shakspeare, with exquisite meanness of expression, "play-writing, in this poet's time, was hardly considered a creditable employ." Ford probably had something of the vanity which Congreve manifested to Voltaire, in desiring to be considered rather as a gentleman than as a dramatist. There was much of the "nice man" in his disposition. He evidently belonged not to the school of "irregular" genius, so far as regarded worldly reputation; and we can imagine what disdain would have shot from the burning eyes of Marlowe, had that sublime vagabond lived to see a dramatist studious of conventional decorum, and fastidious in small things. A contemporary satire, The Lines, quoted by Gifford, has a thrust at Ford, which illustrates as well as caricatures his peculiarity:

"Deep in a dump, John Ford by himself gat,

With folded arms and melancholy hat."

He wrote sixteen plays, four of which, in manuscript, shared, with eleven of Massinger's, the distinguished honor of being consumed by Mr. Warburton's remorseless cook, for waste-paper. He seems to have retired to the country or the grave, it is uncertain which, shortly

before the breaking out of the civil wars.

The date of his last published play, The Lady's Trial, is 1639.

In this hurried survey of some of the Old English Dramatists, we have not been able to do more than faintly indicate their genius and individual peculiarities. It would be impossible in our limited space to do full justice to the merits of each. Indeed, though separated by individual differences, and influenced by the changes which came over the spirit of their age, they have all a general resemblance. Fletcher and Ford, perhaps, best indicate the gradual relaxation of the old sturdy strength,

- that passage of comedy from humorous character into diverting incident, of tragedy from the sterner into the softer passions, that gradual weakening of poetic diction by too strong an infusion of sweetness, which distinguish an age slowly sinking from the region of heroic ideas into those merely romantic. But still, all these writers have, more or less, that depth, daring, vitality, comprehension, objectiveness, that quick observation of external life and nature, and that ready interpretation of both by inward light, that varied power and melody of versification, at times so soft and lingering, bending beneath its rich freight of delicious fancies, at others so fierce and headlong, glowing in every part with the fire of passion, that wide sway over the heart's deepest and most delicate emotions, and that thoroughly English cast of nature, which associate them all in the mind, as belonging to one era of literature, and partaking of the general character stamped upon it. It would be impossible to point out a class of authors, who have appeared in any of the Augustan ages of letters, more essentially brave and strong, any who have spoken the language of thought and pas

sion more directly from the heart and brain,—any who more despised obtaining fame and producing effects by elaborate refinements and petty brilliancies,

any who have stouter muscle and bone. Whenever English literature has been timid and creeping, whenever the natural expression of emotion has been debased by a feeble or feverish "poetic diction," it has been to the old dramatists that men have recurred for examples of a more courageous spirit and a nobler style.

ROMANCE OF RASCALITY.

THAT this is a great world is a maxim forced upon the attention by the moral aspect of every-day events. It is especially apparent, when we consider the room it affords for the operations of knaves. The great brotherhood of rogues, who live by cheating and corrupting the species, now occupy some of the most important posts in society, science, and letters, and, as missionaries of the devil, are threading every avenue to the heart and brain of the community. Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention. One of its latest and most influential is the Romance of Rascality. To a man who knows what it is to have his pocket picked, or a knife insinuated into his ribs, there may appear little that is romantic in the operation; but to a large and increasing portion of society it is otherwise. Thieves and cut-throats have come to be considered the most important and interesting of men, and virtuous mediocrity to be valuable only as affording them subjects for experiment. There is a certain piquant shamelessness, a peculiarly ingenious dishonesty, in some of the forms of literary chicane, which nothing can equal in impudence; for it is practically assumed that the final cause of human society is the provision of a brilliant theatre for the exploits of its outcasts.

At one time, it was considered settled that the domain of ideality was closed to vulgar criminals, and that