The flower that I would pluck And put between my breasts, then but beginning To swell about the blossom, oh! she would long Till she had such another, and commit it To the like innocent cradle, where phœnix-like They died in perfume. I am ashamed to waste words in vindicating this passage, which Boyle sets by the language of Iachimo in Cymbeline in describing the mole on Imogen’s breast(352) to a company of gentlemen. The next one is “decisive of the question of the authorship of our play.” 1ST QUEEN. When her arms, Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall By warranting moonlight corslet thee, O when Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall(353) Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think Of rotten kings and blubbered queens? What care For what thou feel’st not, what thou feel’st being able To make Mars spurn his drum? O, if thou covet But one night with her, every hour in’t will Take hostage of thee for a hundred, and Thou shalt remember nothing more than what That banquet bids thee to.(354) Though there are passages in Massinger of which the thought is similar to that presented here, I do not judge it or them as severely as Boyle. The point, however, which I wish to make is this: these lines are typical of what I have called the archaic flavour of the play. Where in Massinger’s works will you find “warranting moonlight,” “tasteful lips,” “twinning cherries,” “rotten kings and blubbered queens,” or “Mars’ drum”? The idea that Massinger wrote this passage is quite preposterous; the only thing in it which reminds one of him is the “and” at the end of line 204. Lastly, we have Hippolyta’s words in the same scene: Yet I think Did I not by the abstaining of my joy, Which breeds a deeper longing, cure their surfeit That craves a present medicine, I should pluck All ladies’ scandal on me.(355) Hippolyta agrees in these lines to postpone her wedding in order that the Queens should be avenged on Creon. No doubt the lines are crude, but Boyle goes too far with his “cloven hoof,” his “effluvia of social corruption,” his “thick miasma.” “There is a close parallel between _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ and _A Very Woman_ in the treatment of madness.”(356) I do not see much similarity between the prose of the one play and the poetry of the other, but so far as any exists it is due to the common ideas of the age as to the way in which to treat the mad. “The reflections in the dialogue of Palamon and Arcite,(357) on the corruptions of Thebes, the neglect of soldiers, the extravagance of fashion, are allusions such as Massinger makes to contemporary English life.”(358) The allusions are such as any moralist might make, and if the rough and immature style in which they are expressed is not like Massinger’s the argument falls to the ground.