verse of Massinger, which never loses dignity and is so incapable of expressing climaxes of passion, is once or twice almost forgotten, or else rises to a majesty which transfigures it. Though forensic declamation was always the especial forte of this dramatist, he literally out-did himself in his management of the suit for the dead Marshal’s body. The elaborate rhetoric of Charmi, checked by the stern harshness of Novall Senior, the indignant outburst of Romont, and the sad, yet noble calmness of Charalois’ speech in which he presses the forlorn alternative, succeed one another with striking contrast; the very flow of the verse changes with the speaker in a manner which recalls the wonderful employment of this device by Shakespeare, as, for example, in the First Act of Othello. In the final Scene of Act IV, Massinger achieves a climax worthy of Fletcher himself;—save, perhaps, the denouement of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and the great scene in The Duke of Milan in which Sforza’s faith in his Duchess is broken down by aspersion after aspersion, until he slays her, only to learn the terrible truth one instant later, it is the most dramatic situation he ever worked up. Field, too, seems to have been on his mettle: his verse is more trenchant, his care greater than in his two earlier comedies; the lines (II, i, 126–7)

touch the high-water mark of his poetic endeavor.

Blemishes, indeed, are not unapparent. The episodic first Scene of Act V is a rather stupid piece of pseudo-comedy by Massinger, which serves no function adequate to justify its existence, while it interrupts the thread of the main story at a point where its culminating intensity does not, of right, permit such a diversion. Gifford in commenting upon this Scene makes the amazing pronouncement that it serves “to prove how differently the comic part of this drama would have appeared, if the whole had fortunately fallen into the hands of Massinger.” Surely never was criticism more fatuous.

But the most serious—indeed, the outstanding—defect of the play is the easy readiness of Charalois to break with Romont. The calm, unregretful placidity with which he untwists the long web of friendship with a man who has stood by him through weal and woe, who has courted a prison’s chains for his sake, shocks us, and repels us with its flinty self-sufficiency. It is not that we know him to be wrong and Romont to be right; suppose the high faith of Charalois in Beaumelle to be entirely justified and the charge of Romont to be as groundless as it is wildly delivered and unconvincing, yet there is no excuse for the immediacy with which, on the first revelation of what he himself has demanded 

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