"The Trial of Chivalry" is a less extravagant example of homely romantic drama than "The Four Prentices of London." We owe to Mr. Bullen the rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and verification of its authorship. In style and in spirit it is perfect Heywood: simple and noble in emotion and conception, primitive and straightforward in construction and expression; inartistic but not ineffectual; humble and facile, but not futile or prosaic. It is a rather more rational and natural piece of work than might have been expected from its author when equipped after the heroic fashion of Mallory or Froissart: its date is more or less indistinctly indicated by occasional rhymes and peculiar conventionalities of diction: and if Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may now and then suggest to his reader the figure of Sancho Panza in his master's armor, his pedestrian romance is so genuine, his modest ambition so high-spirited and high-minded, that it would be juster and more critical to compare him with Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements of his esquire. Dick Bowyer, whose life and death are mendaciously announced on the catch-penny title-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol") "does _not_ die," is a rather rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff British soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to better advantage in other plays of Heywood and his fellows. That this must be classed among the earlier if not the earliest of his works we may infer from the primitive simplicity of a stage direction which recalls another in a play printed five years before. In the second scene of the third act of "The Trial of Chivalry" we read as follows: "Enter Forester, missing the other taken away, speaks anything, and exit." In the penultimate scene of the second part of "King Edward IV." we find this even quainter direction, which has been quoted before now as an instance of the stage conditions or habits of the time: "Jockie is led to whipping over the stage, speaking some words, but of no importance."