and the latter forced against her will into a marriage with the wealthy Count Montsurry. This, he maintained, palliated the heroine's surrender to passion and made her "distress in the last Act... much more liable to pity." Whether morality is really a gainer by this well-meant variation from the more primitive code of the original play is open to question, but we welcome the substitution of Teresia the "governess" and confidante of Tamyra for Friar Comolet as the envoy between the lovers. Another notable change is the omission of the narrative of the Nuntius, which is replaced by a short dueling scene upon the stage. D'Urfey rejects, too, the supernatural machinery in Act IV, and the details of the torture of the erring Countess, whom, at the close of the play, he represents not as wandering from her husband's home, but as stabbing herself in despair.

If Chapman's plot needed to be "writ new" at all, D'Urfey deserves credit for having done his work with considerable skill and taste, though he hints in his dedication that there were detractors who did not view his version as favorably as Lord Carlisle. He had some difficulty, he tells us, in finding an actor to undertake the part, but at last prevailed upon Mountfort to do so, though he was diffident of appearing in a role in which Hart had made so great a reputation. Mrs. Bracegirdle, as we learn from the list of Dramatis Personae prefixed to the published edition, played Tamyra, and the revival seems to have been a success. But Mountfort was assassinated in the Strand towards the close of the following year, and apparently the career of Bussy upon the boards ended with his life.

In the same year as D'Urfey revised the play, Langbaine published his Account of the English Dramatick Poets, wherein (p. 59) he mentions that Bussy "has the preference" among all Chapman's writings and vindicates it against Dryden's attack: "I know not how Mr. Dryden came to be so possessed with indignation against this play, as to resolve to burn one annually to the memory of Ben Jonson: but I know very well that there are some who allow it a just commendation; and others that since have taken the liberty to promise a solemn annual sacrifice of The Hind and Panther to the memory of Mr. Quarles and John Bunyan."

But neither D'Urfey nor Langbaine could secure for Bussy D'Ambois a renewal of its earlier popularity. During the eighteenth century, it fell into complete oblivion, and though (as the Bibliography testifies) nineteenth-century critics and commentators have sought to atone for the neglect of their predecessors, the faults of the play, obvious at a glance, have 

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