"O take care of wine! Cold water is far better for your healths, Of which I am very tender."--_The Picture._ He wrote rapidly, and his pen was never idle; yet he lived in miserable poverty. There is no record either that he was married--no indication that, like every other poet, he had an unfortunate or unrequited attachment. His pilgrimage had one solace, that of a fervent religion; which had, probably, much of the superstitions which were mingled, in those early days of Protestantism, with the reformed faith. The Church of England was then “an untrimmed vessel, lurching now towards Rome, and now towards Geneva;” it is therefore no wonder if many of the young, the impassioned, the imaginative, inclined to that form of faith and of worship which wore at least the semblance of venerable seniority.[192] Footnote 192: Hartley Coleridge’s “Introduction,” p. xxv. There is not a line in Massinger’s works that can either convict him of Romanism, or stamp him as a Protestant. Like many of his contemporaries, his romantic fancy was captivated by the picturesque ceremonial, the saintly observances, the _dramatic_ services of the Romish Church; and to this was probably added a disgust to that puritanic fervour by which not only the drama--to which there were, in fact, many just exceptions to be made--but all that was enchanting in life, poetry, secular music, revelry (not necessarily corrupting), was condemned as sinful, and all intellectual luxury prohibited and anathematized. The Herbert family continued to be friends to Massinger--at all events, to lend him the support of their name. He dedicated “The New Way to Pay Old Debts,” the most celebrated of his plays, to Robert, Earl of Carnarvon. “I was born,” he says, “a most devoted servant to the thrice noble family of your incomparable lady, and am most ambitious, though at a proper distance, to be known to your lordship.” Robert, Earl of Carnarvon, who had married the Lady Katherine Herbert, although a friend and favourer of the Muses, and also Grand Falconer of England, is long since forgotten--whilst the poet, who addressed him “at a proper distance,” is remembered with pride and interest.