In the same year as "Eastward Ho!" appeared the best and completest piece of work which we owe to the single hand of Marston. A more brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch Courtesan," better composed, better constructed, and better written, it would be difficult to discover among the best comic and romantic works of its incomparable period. The slippery and sanguinary strumpet who gives its name to the play is sketched with such admirable force and freedom of hand as to suggest the existence of an actual model who may unconsciously have sat for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen and merciless as ever took notes for a savagely veracious caricature--or for an unscrupulously moral exposure. The jargon in which her emotions are expressed is as Shakespearean in its breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emotions is worthy of a less farcical vehicle for the expression of such natural craft and passion. The sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia and Phoenixella in the earliest surviving comedy of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, is even more coarsely and roughly drawn than in the early sketch of the more famous dramatist. On the other hand, it must be allowed--though it may not be recognized without a certain sense of surprise--that the nobler and purer type of womanhood or girlhood which we owe to the hand of Marston is far above comparison with any which has been accomplished or achieved by the studious and vehement elaboration of Ben Jonson's. The servility of subservience which that great dramatist exacts from his typically virtuous women--from the abject and anaemic wife of a Corvino or a Fitzdottrel--is a quality which could not coexist with the noble and loving humility of Marston's Beatrice. The admirable scene in which she is brought face to face with the impudent pretentions of the woman who asserts herself to have been preferred by the betrothed lover of the expectant bride is as pathetic and impressive as it is lifelike and original; and even in the excess of gentleness and modesty which prompts the words, "I will love you the better; I cannot hate what he affected," there is nothing less noble or less womanly than in the subsequent reply to the harlot's repeated taunts and inventions of insult: "He did not ill not to love me, but sure he did not well to mock me: gentle minds will pity, though they cannot love; yet peace and my love sleep with him." The powerful soliloquy which closes the scene expresses no more than the natural emotion of the man who has received so lovely a revelation of his future bride's invincible and single-hearted love: Cannot that woman's evil, jealousy, Despite disgrace, nay, which is worse, contempt, Once stir thy faith?