Nicholas Rowe, who was the first modern editor of Shakespeare, contemplated also an edition of Massinger, but gave up the project that he might more safely plunder one of his plays. Rowe’s famous tragedy, _The Fair Penitent_, was deliberately stolen from _The Fatal Dowry_. It appeared in 1703, and spite of a ludicrous accident[13] which cut short its first run, took rank as one of the most celebrated dramas of the English stage. Rowe lived during the vogue of the “She-tragedy,” while the canons of literary criticism of his day demanded a “regular,” pseudo-classical form and a sententious tone. Accordingly, in his hands the chief figure in the play, as is evidenced by the change in title, becomes the guilty wife, here called Calista, who is “now the evil queen of the heroic plays; now the lachrymose moralizer;” the theme is indeed _her_ story, not Altamont’s (Charalois)--her seduction (prior to the nuptuals and before the opening of the play), her grief, her plight, her exposure, her death;--she holds the centre of the stage to the very end. The number of the _dramatis personae_ is cut down to eight; all touches of comedy are excised; and the double plot of the original is unified by the bold stroke of throwing back to a time before the opening of the play the entire episode of the unburied corpse and the origin of the hero’s friendship with the father of the heroine. Discussions of the relative merits of _The Fair Penitent_ and its source have been almost invariably acrimonious. Nor is this to be wondered at, for after reading the old tragedy with its severe dignity and noble restraint, one can scarce peruse without irritation the cloyingly melifluous, emasculated verse of Rowe--by turns grandiloquent and sentimental. The characterization of _The Fair Penitent_ is, in the main, insipid, and while Rowe’s heroine holds a commanding place in her drama to which Beaumelle does not pretend, the latter is a great deal more natural, and indeed, for that matter, far more truly a “penitent.” An exception to the general insipidity is Lothario, who is the analogue of the insignificant Novall Junior--“the gay Lothario”--whose very name has been ever since a synonym for the graceful, graceless, devil-may-care libertine--whose figure has been the prototype of a long line of similar characters in English literature, beginning with Richardson’s Lovelace and not yet closed with Anthony Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau. Beside this striking creation, the seducer of Beaumelle shows poorly indeed; but it is doubtful if the old dramatists would have consented to paint such an attractive rogue, had they been able; they wanted their Novall to be just the cowardly, dandyfied thing they made him. Beyond the portrait of Lothario, small ground for praise can be found in _The Fair Penitent_. That part of the action of _The Fatal Dowry_ which under Rowe’s treatment antedates the rise of the curtain is narrated in the most stiffly mechanical sort