At times the poet rises to what is not far removed from inspiration; and such lines as the following from _The Parliament of Love_ make good the claim of English to be the imperial language of the world. King Charles seeks to justify the honours which he, the “most Christian king,” gives to the statue of Cupid; he then continues thus: CHARLES. ’Tis rather to instruct deceived mankind, How much pure love that has his birth in heaven, And scorns to be received a guest, but in A noble heart prepared to entertain him, Is by the gross misprision of weak men, Abused and injured. That celestial fire, Which hieroglyphically is described In this his bow, his quiver, and his torch, First warm’d their bloods, and after gave a name To the old heroic spirits; such as Orpheus, That drew men, differing little then from beasts, To civil government; or famed Alcides The tyrant-queller, that refused the plain And easy path leading to vicious pleasures, And ending in a precipice deep as hell, To scale the rugged cliffs on whose firm top Virtue and Honour, crown’d with wreaths of stars, Did sit triumphant.(132) But there is another characteristic of Massinger’s style and that perhaps more obvious still; it is full of courtliness and grace. A perusal of _The City Madam_, where the subject is the absurdity of the ladies of the Mansion House who ape the manners of the West End, suggests the question whether Massinger was ever attached to the Court. We do not know. He must, at any rate, have moved amongst refined and educated people. Napoléon said that Corneille’s plays ought to be performed to an audience of ambassadors and ministers of state;(133) in the same way, in reading Massinger, we feel that we are moving freely in the palaces of the great. There is comparatively little here of dialect(134) or low life; we are at once taken up into high life with all its virtues and its faults. The kings and courtiers behave and express themselves as we should expect them to do; the politeness and the compliments which we hear on every side have the merit of being entirely natural. And if there is little to remind us of Dickens, there is still less to recall Thackeray. There is no air of snobbishness; such is the dexterity of our author that we do not feel like Jeames Yellowplush, that we are awkward menials watching the doings of the titled and the great. Not only do the characters move with an inborn grace which is free from self-analysis and self-contempt, but they take the audience up into their company; and as the gallants of that era used sometimes to sit upon the stage, close among the actors,(135) so in reading Massinger we feel that we are unconsciously present at the scenes he portrays.