Ford owes his position among English dramatists to the intensity of his passion, in particular scenes and passages where the character, the author and the reader are alike lost in the situation and in the sentiment evoked by it; and this gift is a supreme dramatic gift. But his plays--with the exception of _The Witch of Edmonton_, in which he doubtless had a prominent share--too often disturb the mind like a bad dream which ends as an unsolved dissonance; and this defect is a supreme dramatic defect. It is not the rigid or the stolid who have the most reason to complain of the insufficiency of tragic poetry such as Ford's; nor is it that morality only which, as Ithocles says in _The Broken Heart_, "is formed of books and school-traditions," which has a right to protest against the final effect of the most powerful creations of his genius. There is a morality which both "Keeps the soul in tune, At whose sweet music all our actions dance," and is able to physic "The sickness of a mind Broken with griefs." Of that morality--or of that deference to the binding power within man and the ruling power above him--tragedy is the truest expounder, even when it illustrates by contrasts; but the tragic poet who merely places the problem before us, and bids us stand aghast with him at its cruelty, is not to be reckoned among the great masters of a divine art. BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The best edition of Ford is that by Gifford, with notes and introduction, revised with additions to both text and notes by Alexander Dyce (1869). An edition of the _Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford_ appeared in 1840, with an introduction by Hartley Coleridge. _The Best Plays of Ford_ were edited for the "Mermaid Series" in 1888, with an introduction by W.H. Havelock Ellis, and reissued in 1903. A.C. Swinburne's "Essay on Ford" is reprinted among his _Essays and Studies_ (1875). _Perkin Warbeck_ and _'Tis Pity_ were translated into German by F. Bodenstedt in 1860; and the latter again by F. Blei in 1904. The probable sources of the various plays are discussed in Emil Koeppel's _Quellenstudien zu den Dramen George Chapman's, Philip Massinger's und John Ford's_ (1897). (A. W. W.)