lack of sufficient elaboration, and a general thinness of design and workmanship are discoverable. Defects such as these could be readily corrected by association with the single-minded, painstaking, thorough Massinger. On the other hand he possessed a lightness of touch, a blithe vigor, and a racy, though often obscene, humor foreign to his colleague. What is more important, he possessed a considerable first-hand knowledge of men and women, and an ability to put them in his plays and endow them with something of life—not to conceive great figures, such as dominate the imagination, but to reproduce with vitality and freshness the sort of people he saw about him—in other words, not to create but to depict; and furthermore Field seems to have had a special gift for sketching them rather clearly in a very brief compass.11 Mr. Saintsbury was right in declaring that Massinger never could draw a woman. But Field could, and the critic was rather unfortunate in applying his broadly correct observation to the one woman of Massinger’s in the delineation of whom he had Field to help him!

With these facts in mind, the distinctive virtues of The Fatal Dowry can be accounted for. Massinger here possessed a colleague who had just those talents of insight and verve and grasp of life that were denied his own plodding, bookishly learned mind. Not only young Novall and his satellites, but Beaumelle certainly, and probably Pontalier (whom Massinger would have been more likely to degrade to the baseness of Novall’s other dependents) may be put down as essentially Field’s creations, while in the case of the others he was ever at Massinger’s elbow to guard him against blunders, if, indeed, their preliminary mapping out of the rather obvious lines along which the action and characters must develop were not of itself a sufficiently sure guide. To Massinger, on the other hand, may safely be ascribed the basic conception of such stately figures as Charalois and Rochfort, however much Field may have been responsible for preserving them as fresh and living portraits.

As to share in plot structure, in the absence of any known source, we may conjecture that the germ from which the play evolved was the conception of that situation by which Charalois, burdened as he is with an immense debt of thankfulness to Rochfort, finds himself suddenly called by the imperative demands of honor to do that which will strike his benefactor to the heart. The grounding of the hero’s debt of gratitude in the story of Miltiades and Cimon was probably the work of Massinger, of whose veneration for things classic we have abundant evidence, while to him also, we may believe, was due the shaping of the story in 

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