that life is not seen in a truer perspective when it is seen in the fairer prospect of an ideal remoteness. Perhaps we must always go a little way back in order to get into the land of romance, as Scott and Hawthorne did. And yet it is within us too. An unskilful story-teller always raises our suspicion by putting a foot-note to any improbable occurrence, to say “This is a fact,” and the so-called realist raises doubts in my mind when he assures me that he, and he alone, gives me the facts of life. Too often all I can say is, if these are the facts, I don’t want them. The police reports give me more than I care for every day. But are they the facts? I had much rather believe them to be the accidental and transitory phenomena of our existence here. The real and abiding facts are those that are recognized as such by the soul when it is in that upper chamber of our being which is farthest removed from the senses, and commerces with its truer self. I very much prefer “King Lear” to Balzac’s bourgeois version of it in “Le Père Goriot,” as I do the _naïveté_ of Miranda to that of Voltaire’s Ingénu, and, when I look about me in the Fortunate Islands of the poet, would fain exclaim with her: “O! wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world, That has such people in ’t!” Those old poets had a very lordly contempt for probability when improbability would serve their purpose better. But Massinger taxes our credulity less than most of them, for his improbabilities are never moral; that is, are never impossibilities. I do not recall any of those sudden conversions in his works from baseness to loftiness of mind, and from vice to virtue, which trip up all our expectations so startlingly in many an old play. As to what may be called material improbabilities, we should remember that two hundred and fifty years ago many things were possible, with great advantage to complication of plot, which are no longer so. The hand of an absolute prince could give a very sudden impulse to the wheel of Fortune, whether to lift a minion from the dust or hurl him back again; men might be taken by Barbary corsairs and sold for slaves, or turn Turks, as occasion required. The world was fuller of chances and changes than now, and the boundaries of the possible, if not of the probable, far wider. Massinger was discreet in the use of these privileges, and does not abuse them, as his contemporaries and predecessors so often do. His is a possible world, though it be in some ways the best of all possible worlds. He puts no strain upon our imaginations.