The endorsement on this appeal shows that Hinchlow sent the money. No doubt Field was selected to write it as the person most necessary to Hinchlow, who could much more easily get along without a new play than without a popular actor. It is plain from the document itself that the signers of it were all under arrest, probably for some tavern bill, or it would not otherwise be easy to account for their being involved in a common calamity. Davison was doubtless released as being the least valuable. It is amusing to see how Hinchlow’s humanity and Christianity are briefly appealed to first as a matter of courtesy, and how the real arguments are addressed to his self-interest as more likely to prevail. Massinger’s words are of some value as showing that he had probably for some time been connected with the stage. There are two other allusions to Massinger in the registers of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels. Both are to plays of his now lost. Of one of them even the name has not survived. On the 11th of January, 1631, Sir Henry refused to license this nameless performance “because it did contain dangerous matter--as the deposing of Sebastian King of Portugal by Philip II., there being peace sworn between England and Spain.” He adds, amusingly enough, “I had my fee notwithstanding, which belongs to me for reading it over, and ought always to be brought with a book.” Again, in 1638, at the time of the dispute between Charles I. and his subjects about ship-money, Sir Henry quotes from a manuscript play of Massinger submitted to him for censure the following passage:-- “Monies? We’ll raise supplies which way we please, And force you to subscribe to blanks in which We’ll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws But what their swords did ratify, the wives And daughters of the senators bowing to Their wills as deities,” etc. Sir Henry then adds, “This is a piece taken out of Philip Massinger’s play called ‘The King and the Subject,’ and entered here forever to be remembered by my son and those that cast their eyes upon it, in honor of King Charles, my master, who, reading the play over at Newmarket, set his mark upon the place with his own hand and in these words: ‘This is too insolent, and to be changed.’ Note that the poet makes it the speech of Don Pedro, King of Spain, and spoken to his subjects.” Coleridge rather hastily calls Massinger a democrat. But I find no evidence of it in his plays. He certainly was no advocate of the slavish doctrine of passive obedience, or of what Pope calls the right divine of kings to govern wrong, as Beaumont and Fletcher often were, but he could not have been a democrat without being an anachronism, and that no man can be.