Massinger resembles other dramatists of his age; at times we feel that they talk like the little boys on the links in Stevenson’s _Lantern-Bearers_. But Massinger is a robuster mind than Fletcher, for example; if he brings vice upon the stage, and if he speaks too freely about things which we prefer not to have mentioned, if “like Hogarth, he enjoys his own portrayal of degrading vice and its appalling consequences,”(188) we must, to do him justice, take his work as a whole. Indeed, most of the critics have singled out as one of his special claims to praise his sturdy morality,(189) and the general effect on any fair mind of a perusal of his plays is a conviction that he loved virtue. Vitelli(190) may make the best of both worlds, but he converts Donusa, and faces death and torture with fortitude. Goodness emerges from Massinger’s plays, sometimes compromised for the moment, but always triumphant in the end. There is considerable outspokenness, but not much lubricity, and no perverted morality. Passages which offend can nearly always, as in Shakspere, be omitted without damaging the course of the plot. Moreover, as has often been pointed out, the works of Massinger are almost wholly free from blasphemy and profanity, and attacks on the clergy, such as moved the wrath of Jeremy Collier in later times. It may be a fanciful suggestion, but it is possible that the drama of that day suffered from the fact that boys took the female parts.(191) No one would deny the artistic loss thereby involved, but there was a moral loss as well. It made it possible for things to be said that would not have been said by men to women, still less by women to men. It unconsciously invested the love-scenes with an air of unreality and grossness. It prevented the relation of the sexes from being depicted with that union of passion and purity which, though difficult, is possible.