_Shakespeare_: ’Tis in my memory locked, And you yourself shall keep the key of it. In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death, here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift Shakespeare’s figure is! We may add two more passages, not given by our commentator; here the model is Webster. They occur on the same page, an artless confession. Here he comes, His nose held up; he hath something in the wind, is hardly comparable to “the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul porpoise before a storm,” and when we come upon as tann’d galley-slaves Pay such as do redeem them from the oar it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the _Duchess of Malfi_. Massinger fancied this galley-slave; for he comes with his oar again in the _Bondman_— Never did galley-slave shake off his chains, Or looked on his redemption from the oar.... Now these are mature plays; and the _Roman Actor_ (from which we have drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been the preferred play of its author. We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger’s feeling for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and his vocabulary were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries—we name Middleton, Webster, Tourneur—is a gift for combining, for fusing into a single phrase, two or more diverse impressions. ... in her strong toil of grace of Shakespeare is such a fusion; the metaphor identifies itself with what suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique— Does the silk worm _expend_ her _yellow labours_?... Why does yon fellow _falsify highways_ And lays his life between the judge’s lips To _refine_ such a one? keeps horse and men To _beat their valours_ for her? Let the common sewer take it from distinction.... Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us.... These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually _eingeschachtelt_ into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled. And, indeed, with the end of Chapman, Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a period when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became word and the word was sensation. The next period is the period of Milton (though still with a Marvell in it); and this period is initiated by Massinger.