"Thou cheat'st us, Ford; mak'st one seem two by art: What is Love's Sacrifice but the Broken Heart?" It has been concluded that in the latter part of his life he gratified the tendency to seclusion for which he was ridiculed in _The Time Poets_ (_Choice Drollery_, 1656) by withdrawing from business and from literary life in London, to his native place; but nothing is known as to the date of his death. His career as a dramatist very probably began by collaboration with other authors. With Thomas Dekker he wrote _The Fairy Knight_ and _The Bristowe Merchant_ (licensed in 1624, but both unpublished), with John Webster _A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother_ (licensed in 1624). A play entitled _An ill Beginning has a good End_, brought on the stage as early as 1613 and attributed to Ford, was (if his) his earliest acted play; whether _Sir Thomas Overbury's Life and untimely Death_ (1615) was a play is extremely doubtful; some lines of indignant regret by Ford on the same subject are still preserved. He is also said to have written, at dates unknown, _The London Merchant_ (which, however, was an earlier name for Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_) and _The Royal Combat_; a tragedy by him, _Beauty in a Trance_, was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1653, but never printed. These three (or four) plays were among those destroyed by Warburton's cook. _The Queen, or the Excellency of the Sea_, a play of inverted passion, containing some fine sensuous lines, printed in 1653 by Alexander Singhe for private performance, has been recently edited by W. Bang (_Materialien zur Kunde d. alteren engl. Dramas_, 13, Louvain, 1906), and is by him on internal evidence confidently claimed as Ford's. Of the plays by Ford preserved to us the dates span little more than a decade--the earliest, _The Lover's Melancholy_, having been acted in 1628 and printed in 1629, the latest, _The Lady's Trial_, acted in 1638 and printed in 1639.