Marston--another John[26]--if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his _Image of Pygmalion_ had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson on _Eastward Hoe!_ won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from _What you Will_; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning: “I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh, Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept; And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate:--still my spaniel slept. Still on went I: first, _an sit anima_, Then, an’ ’twere mortal. O hold, hold! At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept. Then, whether ’twere corporeal, local, fixed, _Ex traduce_; but whether’t had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions, all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part; But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pried, Stuffed noting books,--and still my spaniel slept. At length he waked, and yawned, and by yon sky, For aught I know, he knew as much as I.” _Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher._ Some dozen or more existing plays are attributed to Philip Massinger,[27] and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name. Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been dependant, or _protégé_ of the Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day; and at the last it would appear that he found burial, only as an outsider and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge, where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to his dramas; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are murderous zealots, in his Sforza[28] story at least, who could fairly have clashed swords with the assassins of “Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named--outside some few of Shakespeare’s--no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times, “He frights men out of their estates, And breaks through all law-nets--made to curb ill men-- As they were cobwebs.”