It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a wholly eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the senses is not inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse of Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation of this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by Massinger is a different verse from that of his predecessors; but it is not a development based on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On the contrary, it seems to lead us away from feeling altogether. We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr. Cruickshank, says that Milton’s blank verse owes much to the study of Massinger’s. In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring choice and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the perfection of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur’s _Atheist’s Tragedy_ out of the question, only two masters in the drama, Shakespeare in his latest period and Massinger. This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred Tourneur’s apprentice work to his _Revenger’s Tragedy_, and one must think that he had never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be ludicrous, the praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of Massinger’s syntax— What though my father Writ man before he was so, and confirm’d it, By numbering that day no part of his life In which he did not service to his country; Was he to be free therefore from the laws And ceremonious form in your decrees? Or else because he did as much as man In those three memorable overthrows, At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master, The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life, To be excused from payment of those sums Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal To serve his country forced him to take up!