Massinger wrote thirty-seven plays, of which only eighteen have come down to us. The name of one of these non-extant plays, “The Noble Choice,” gives a keen pang to a lover of the poet, for it seems to indicate a subject peculiarly fitted to bring out his best qualities as a dramatist. Four of the lost plays were used to kindle fires by that servant of Mr. Warburton who made such tragic havoc in our earlier dramatic literature, a vulgar Omar without the pious motive of the Commander of the Faithful, if, as is very doubtful, he did indeed order the burning of the Alexandrian Library. To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows for those things that are lovely and of good report in human nature, for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and honorable, and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind of poetry with few rapids or cataracts, but singularly soothing and companionable. The Latin adjective for gentleman, _generosus_, fits him aptly. His plots are generally excellent; his versification masterly, with skilful breaks and pauses, capable of every needful variety of emotion; and his dialogue easy, natural, and sprightly, subsiding in the proper places to a refreshing conversational tone. This graceful art was one seldom learned by any of those who may be fairly put in comparison with him. Even when it has put on the sock, their blank verse cannot forget the stride and strut it had caught of the cothurnus. Massinger never mouths or rants, because he seems never to have written merely to fill up an empty space. He is therefore never bombastic, for bombast gets its metaphorical name from its original physical use as padding. Indeed, there are very few empty spaces in his works. His plays are interesting alike from their story and the way it is told. I doubt if there are so many salient short passages, striking images, or pregnant sayings to be found in his works as may be found in those of very inferior men. But we feel always that we are in the company of a serious and thoughtful man, if not in that of a great thinker. Great thinkers, indeed, are seldom so entertaining as he. If he does not tax the mind of his reader, nor call out all its forces with profound problems of psychology, he is infinitely suggestive of not unprofitable reflection, and of agreeable nor altogether purposeless meditation. His is “a world whose course is equable,” where “calm pleasures abide,” if no “majestic pains.” I never could understand Lamb’s putting Middleton and Rowley above him, unless, perhaps, because he was less at home on the humbler levels of humanity, less genial than they, or, at least, than Rowley. But there were no proper æsthetic grounds of comparison, if I am right in thinking, as I do, that he differed from them in kind, and that his kind was the higher.