The plays give us no clear evidence that Massinger ever travelled abroad,(22) though such a passage as _The Great __ Duke of Florence_, II., 2, 5-21, rather suggests a visit to Italy. Nor have we any ground for supposing that he was, like Shakspere, an actor, unless indeed an obscure reference in the Dublin poem to the Earl of Pembroke be so interpreted.(23) In London he lived on the Bankside, Southwark. The story of his death is told us by our gossiping old friend Anthony à Wood, in his _Athenae Oxonienses_.(24) Massinger went to bed one night well, and was found dead the next morning. He was buried at St. Saviour’s on March 18th, 1639/40.(25) The funeral was “accompanied by comedians,” a phrase which seems to show that his professional friends did him honour at the last; he is described in the monthly accounts of St. Saviour’s as “a stranger”—that is to say, a non-parishioner. His intimate friend Sir Aston Cokaine tells us that he shared the grave of his friend John Fletcher;(26) and in 1896 a window in the south aisle of the nave of Southwark Cathedral was unveiled in his honour by Sir Walter Besant.(27) What was the atmosphere in which Massinger lived? The days of James I. and Charles I. were less heroic than those of Elizabeth. In foreign politics England intervened once or twice in an ineffective way, and a good deal of sympathy was shown, much of it in a practical fashion, for the cause of the Protestant King of Bohemia. Gardiner(28) has pointed out that Charles I. gave permission to the Marquis of Hamilton to carry over volunteers in aid of Gustavus Adolphus just as James I. had allowed Vere to carry over volunteers to the Palatinate. Hamilton sailed in July, 1631, and _The Maid of Honour_ was printed in 1632. The whole plot of this play recalls the relations of England to the Protestant cause on the Continent. Thus, William. Lord Craven, to whom Ford’s _Broken Heart_ is dedicated, and who was knighted at the age of seventeen, after his “valiant adventures” in the Netherlands under Henry, Prince of Orange, went to the assistance of Gustavus Adolphus in 1631, when only twenty-two years old. Wars in the Low Countries are vaguely referred to in various passages, as, _e.g._, in _The Fatal Dowry_:(29) NOVALL JUN. Oh, fie upon him, how he wears his clothes! As if he had come this Xmas. from S. Omer’s To see his friends, and return’d after Twelfth-tide. The date of the play is uncertain, but it must have been written some considerable time before being printed in 1632.(30) In _The New Way to pay Old Debts_ Lord Lovell “has purchas’d a fair name in the wars.”(31) In _The Fatal Dowry_, _The Picture_, and _The Unnatural Combat_, we have the familiar type of the brave soldier who is disregarded in time of peace, and has come down to poverty and old clothes.