Colonel Cunningham in his edition gives us the names of thirty-seven plays in all from Massinger’s pen; if the many be added to this total in which he joined with other writers, we have a considerable literary output for a life of fifty-five years. Massinger, like Shakspere, fell into disfavour after the Restoration, when Beaumont and Fletcher carried everything before them. We learn from Malone’s Preface(97) that _The Bondman_ was acted in 1661 and _The Virgin Martyr_ on January 10th, 1662; _The Renegado_ on June 6th in the same year. Pepys saw _The Virgin Martyr_, and liked it,(98) more, however, for the music than the words. Dryden and Jeremy Collier never mention Massinger. Selections from _The Guardian_ appeared in prose form, with insertions from _A Very Woman_, in 1680, under the title _Love Lost in the Dark, or the Drunken Couple_. Adorio and the other names are the same, but the Guardian’s part disappears, and his remarks are put in Adorio’s mouth. A servant, Calandrino, is brought in, whose name is borrowed from _The Great Duke of Florence_, and Muggulla, a nurse, is added to be Calandrino’s bride. The contents are worthy of the title. Monck Mason deplores the fact that Johnson’s dictionary does not once quote Massinger or Beaumont and Fletcher. “They are more correct,” he says, “and grammatical than Shakspere, and appear to have had a more competent knowledge of other languages, which gave them a more accurate idea of their own.” There was a great reaction in the eighteenth century in favour of Massinger. Brander Matthews points out that _The New Way_ is the only Elizabethan or Jacobean play, except Shakspere’s, which held the stage until the first quarter of the nineteenth century,(99) and gives a good history of its illustrious career on the English and American stages. The critics have differed much about Massinger. Gifford(100) and Hallam were enthusiastic in their support; Charles Lamb and Hazlitt(101) were against him, perhaps because they disliked his able Tory editor. The eighteenth-century writers regarded him as the champion of female virtue; and in our own time Sir A. Ward has defended his manly and sane morality in unhesitating language.(102) On the other hand, Boyle deems his heroines to be corrupt and his heroes “the victims of one devouring passion, often in a state of incipient madness, alternately raging and melancholy.”(103) Like Euripides, Ovid, and Juvenal, Massinger is a writer whose faults are patent; all the more important, therefore, is it to make his merits quite clear. We cannot convince the world if we adopt the famous line of Goethe’s heroine: I cannot reason, I can only feel.(104)