Here, at any rate, Massinger differs from Shakspere, who makes no reference to the exploits of our sailors; indeed, it would seem that, like Trafalgar, the defeat of the Armada had no significance for its own generation.(78) But we must not forget that Massinger was the bosom friend of Fletcher, in whose plays sailors occur again and again.(79) The fact that Massinger was a Cavalier “Radical,” a free lance and grumbler of the Opposition, may in part explain his struggles and his poverty. His natural patrons may have looked askance at his independent attitude, so alien to the passive obedience preached by Fletcher. But, whatever were his politics, it is clear that he was no Puritan. Brought up in close contact with a noble house, educated at Oxford, and well versed in the classics,(80) as many allusions in his works testify, he shows alike in his merits and his faults the Cavalier mind. To this extent he may be judged “_felix opportunitate mortis_,” for of all sections of the nation those whose hearts were with the King, and their reason with the Opposition, had the hardest part to play after 1640. In the department of literature the talent of the country had concentrated itself more and more on play-writing. Among Massinger’s contemporaries we note Jonson, Chapman, Fletcher, Beaumont, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Rowley, Tourneur, Shirley—all keen and able dramatists. Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is typical of an age which had much culture, but which, without being exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre.