As a poet he is inferior to many others, and this follows inevitably from the admission we feel bound to make that good sense and good feeling are his leading qualities--yet ready to forget their sobriety in the exhilaration of romantic feeling. When Nature makes a poet, she seems willing to sacrifice all other considerations. Yet this very good sense of Massinger’s has made him excellent as a dramatist. His “New Way to pay Old Debts” is a very effective play, though in the reading far less interesting and pleasing than most of the others. Yet there are power and passion in it, even if the power be somewhat melodramatic, and the passion of an ignoble type. In one respect he was truly a poet--his conceptions of character were ideal; but his diction, though full of dignity and never commonplace, lacks the charm of the inspired and inspiring word, the relief of the picturesque image that comes so naturally to the help of Fletcher. Where he is most fanciful, indeed, the influence of Fletcher is only too apparent both in his thought and diction. I should praise him chiefly for the atmosphere of magnanimity which invests his finer scenes, and which it is wholesome to breathe. In Massinger’s plays people behave generously, as if that were the natural thing to do, and give us a comfortable feeling that the world is not so bad a place, after all, and that perhaps Schopenhauer was right in enduring for seventy-two years a life that wasn’t worth living. He impresses one as a manly kind of person, and the amount of man in a poet, though it may not add to his purely poetical quality, adds much, I think, to our pleasure in reading his works. * * * * *