In assigning Massinger’s place in the drama of his age, we have to remember that the period falls into two well-defined parts. He has very little in common with Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, and still less with the charming Dresden china of Lyly. Marlowe’s generation breathes the freshness and vehemence of the spring, while Massinger reflects the silver lights of September. So rapid was the development of fifty years, that to pass from the one to the other is like going from the lancet windows of Salisbury Cathedral to the tracery of William of Wykeham. While we miss the purity and simplicity of Early English, it would be foolish to ignore the strength of design and proportion that maturity and experience brought. The towers and battlements, the lierne vaulting, the large windows, and generous clerestories of Perpendicular do much to atone for the spiritless detail and mechanical wall-panelling. A similar consideration applies to the Jacobean dramatists when compared with their Elizabethan predecessors. Shall I be thought presumptuous in setting Massinger against Shakspere? The attempt may, at any rate, help to elicit a true estimate; the suggestion has often been made before. Shakspere seems to have been from his writings a man of great receptivity, unerring knowledge of human nature, profound wisdom, and infinite sweetness, the master of all the arts which we associate with a good poet. Massinger reminds us of Ben Jonson, though he is less consciously clever, less cumbered with learning, less combative.(432) He is modest,(433) manly, lucid, sane, and sensible, capable of just indignation, one who respects himself, a faithful friend,(434) and a wide reader; he knows a gentleman when he sees him; he can pay compliments with good breeding; he has had his ups and downs in life;(435) he is one who understood men better than women, and who, like Sir Thomas Browne, “loved a soldier”;(436) a vigorous and business-like artist, he is never worsted by his theme, but makes it lifelike and interesting, with an unerring instinct for what is effective on the stage, his very faults being largely due to this useful knowledge. That there was a strain of noble melancholy in his mind can hardly be denied.(437) The character which seems to me to embody Massinger himself is Charalois in _The Fatal __ Dowry_. Whether he was musical I should doubt after the perfunctory reference to the art in _The Fatal Dowry_.(438) We find nothing in his plays like the famous idyllic description in Ford’s _Lover’s Melancholy_.(439) On the other hand, he knew that vocal and instrumental music were effective in a play; we need go no farther than the end of Act IV. in _The Virgin Martyr_ for proof of this.(440) And Cario uses the terms of music with great precision in _The Guardian_.(441) On the whole we get the impression that he was an example of a rare combination, modesty with independence of mind, a fact which, considering