It is interesting to revise the literary judgments of youth; it is pleasant to find them confirmed by a more mature judgment. This train of thought has led me to read Massinger once more; and as I read, the desire arose to treat his works, to the best of my ability, with the attention to detail which modern scholarship requires. A great amount of valuable work has been done in the last fifty years on the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages; but no one, perhaps with the exception of Boyle, has applied to Massinger the care which Shakspere, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, to name no others, have secured. There is no reason why any of our great dramatists should be treated with less respect than those of Greece and Rome, of France and Germany. The first thing to be done was to facilitate references by numbering the lines of Massinger’s plays;(1) the next was to investigate once more the facts of his life, and to correlate them with the period in which he lived; the third was to read typical plays of the period, so as to arrive at a just estimate of our author. His life will not detain us long. We know far less of him than we do of Shakspere. None of his sayings have been preserved to us; hardly any incidents of his career. His father was house-steward to two of the Earls of Pembroke, first to Henry Herbert, then to William Herbert,(2) Shakspere’s friend. The elder Massinger was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and for several years a Member of Parliament. Philip Massinger, the dramatist, was born at Salisbury in 1584. In 1602 he went up to St. Alban’s Hall, Oxford, where his father had been an undergraduate. We are told by A. à Wood that he went at Lord Pembroke’s expense, but that he did not work hard at the University, and took no degree.(3) In or after the year 1606 he seems to have gone to London, and to have speedily engaged in the work of writing plays.(4) The wide reading which his plays presuppose probably began at Oxford. It was the custom in those days, as in the time of Plautus at Rome,(5) for playwrights to revise old plays; and still more was it usual for them to collaborate.(6) We find Massinger at work in this way with Field,(7) Daborne,(8) Dekker, Tourneur, and above all, with Fletcher. With the latter he worked from 1613 to 1623. In that year, for some unknown reason, he seceded from the service of the leading company of actors of the day, who went by the name of the King’s men, and wrote unaided three plays for the Queen’s men, _The Parliament of Love_, _The Bondman_, and _The Renegado_. After Fletcher’s death, in 1625, Massinger rejoined the King’s men, and wrote for them until his death in 1640.