I, burning then with a most virtuous anger, Razed from my heart the memory of his name, Railed and spit at him; and knew ’twas justice That I should take those deities he scorn’d, Hymen and Cupid, into my protection, And be the instrument of their revenge; And so I cast him off, scorn’d his submission, His poor and childish winnings, will’d my servants To shut my gates against him; but, when neither Disdain, hate, or contempt could free me from His loathsome importunities, and fired too To wreak mine injur’d honour, I took gladly Advantage of his execrable oaths, To undergo what penance I enjoin’d him; Then, to the terror of all future ribalds, That make no difference between love and lust, Imposed this task upon him. I have said, too; Now, when you please, a censure.(175) The critics may differ in their estimate of Massinger’s style and metre; but it is simple truth to say that they are unique in our literature, in their correctness, dignity, ease, and classical frugality. Let us now turn to the poet’s faults. It is said that his range of thought is limited, and this may be at once conceded. It might also be said that Greek tragedy is limited, and the statement is true of all our Elizabethan playwrights; yet we return to them again and again, for they have something to give us which we cannot do without. It is idle to depreciate one period of our literature at the expense of another. Are not the old madrigal writers limited, and Farrant and Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Blow? and yet we enjoy them; nay, to take even Purcell himself, when we confess that the pleasure he gives us is due to the fact that he is more daring, less shackled than his generation, “so modern” as we say, are we not in the end forced to confess that he too is unmistakably limited, “bewrayed” by his quaint and stately rhythms to be one of the seventeenth century? Our age has a wider and subtler range of psychology; to revert from “The Georgian Poets” of 1911 to Massinger is like going back from the films of a cinema palace to a tondo of Luca Signorelli. Both films and tondo have their uses. We may take a single illustration of this point from _The Brothers Karamazov_. The great Russian novelist, among other problems, deals in that book with the case of the young man who is in love with two women at once. That is the sort of complicated interest which we do not expect our Elizabethan writers to cope with, in as great detail as a modern writer uses. The problem occurs in _The Bondman_, where the heroine, Cleora, is distracted between her plighted love to Leosthenes and her warm sense of obligation to Marullo;(176) it is interesting and instructive to see how simply the whole thing is touched upon, and how soon the doubt is solved by the discovery of Leosthenes’ former intrigue with Statilia. May we not say, with Aristophanes, in comparing Massinger and Dostoevsky: