But like the Mammon-worshippers in "A Trick to Catch the Old One," Overreach himself is credulous enough, an easy victim of the conspirators against his pride and pocket. Massinger's indelicacy "has not always the apology of wit," indeed he is not remarkable for humour, any more than most of his contemporaries, who sought and doubtless got a laugh by stereotyped and witless ribaldries. The character part of Greedy, a parasite of Overreach's, remarkable for his appetite,--a shield of brawn and a barrel of Colchester oysters "were to him a dish of tea" before breakfast,--must have been diverting on the stage; and when Marrall turns against his master, we are reminded of similar surprises by Mr. Micawber and Newman Noggs, though _they_ were not accomplices in the iniquities which they exposed. Massinger's plays are often interwoven with the work of other hands, and deal, in a more or less veiled way, with the political situations of his time. He lived in poverty, as his petitions to the Herbert family prove; and he died in 1640. He was dissatisfied with his fortunes and with public indifference; poverty had forced him into poetry, and hunger had made him hasty in his work; the too common calamity of poor authors. Ford. John Ford was a native of Ilsington in Devonshire, baptized on 17 April, 1586. He was of good family, entered the Inns of Court, and is said to have practised in his profession. A contemporary rhymer speaks of him "deep in a dump," "with folded arms and melancholy hat". He worked at plays with Dekker, and in "The Witch of Edmonton" (1622?). Four of his comedies were burned or otherwise put out of being by Betty Barnes, or Baker, the celebrated cook of Warburton, Somerset herald, who made away with at least fifty manuscripts of old plays: his earliest known comedy (1613) was among Betty's victims. His earliest independent surviving piece, "The Lover's Melancholy," was played in 1628. The more serious part has a rather improbable plot turning on the disguise of a girl as a man, but there are many beautiful romantic passages in the loves of Palador, Prince of Cyprus, and Eroclea. A masque of Bedlamites within the play indicates the strange contemporary taste for the terrors and humours of maniacs. In 1633 the famous plays "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," and "The Broken Heart," were printed. The former has a plot of incestuous loves, ending in a pretty general massacre. Given the inspiration of the unnatural, Ford could do great things. In the Prologue to "The Broken Heart" (the scene is Sparta, of all unlikely places) Ford reprobates the staple of low contemporary comedy, "jests fit for a brothel court's applause," "apish laughter," "lame jeers at place or persons"; perhaps Ford was not unaffected by Prynne's famous attack on the stage, "Histriomastix" (1632).