Thomas Heywood was born in Lincolnshire, was a Cambridge man, and by 1596-1598 was an actor and a writer for the stage and the Press. He says that it is no custom of his to print his plays, being faithful to the actors (who lost their rights in a play, when printed). He confesses to having "had a hand or at least a main finger" in two hundred and twenty plays. The strong point in Heywood is his study of domestic manners in Englishmen at home, and as adventurers abroad, as in "The English Traveller," and "The Fair Maid of the West". Here Clem, the son of a baker who, "when corn grew to be at a high rate, never doughed after," frankly says of four sea captains, "I believe they be little better than pirates". Heywood's most celebrated play, "A Woman Killed with Kindness," reads as much like a modern novel as a Jacobean drama. There is no ribaldry, no horrors, only a duel between two sets of men over a disputed hawking match. The hero, Frankford, shelters and entertains a broken gentleman who flees from the field, and the man, though thoroughly conscious of his own villainy, seduces Frankford's wife, who is beautiful and hitherto a pearl of virtue. She yields at a word: Frankford discovers and spares them, the lady makes a pathetic end, and, dying of remorse (of which her lover has his full share), she is "killed with kindness". The pathos and the details of manners are entirely in the style of many modern novels, and the underplot, also serious, if improbable, has the favourite stainless heroine, Susan; a girl of great nobility. There is a most amusing list of the practising "Mediums" of the day, in "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon". They have their specialities, one "doth pretty well for a thing that is lost." Mother Sturton deals in prevision--"is for fore-speaking"; another "practised the book and key" (an automatism, the key is tied into the book, the fingers hold it up under the handle of the key, and the book turns in answer to questions). "All do well," says the witch, "according to their talent. For myself, let the world speak There are some good speeches and good blank verse in "The Iron Age," one of four dramas on the "Four Ages of Hesiod's Mythology". In "The Rape of Lucrece" is an extraordinary set of popular songs, some coarse enough, one in Dutch, and among them the beautiful lyric, Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day, which, more than his twenty-four surviving dramas, keeps Heywood's memory green and fragrant. He wrote miscellaneous pamphlets and books with enormous industry. There is something sympathetic in his very carelessness,--what Lamb precisely meant when he called Heywood "a prose Shakespeare" is disputed. Possibly he meant that Heywood has sweetness of nature, humour, and knowledge of character, without much poetry. Webster.