On the other hand, the usual type of tragedy, with reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, sometimes shows a genuine poetic gift, as notably in Lord Falkland's "The Marriage Night." The most marked trait, however, of these minor tragedies is their eagerness to out-Herod Herod and to make good their weakness in dramatic truth by means of stage horrors or rant. "The Valiant Scot," a tragedy dealing with the career of Wallace, represents the cutting out of the tongue of one English ambassador and the putting out of the eyes of another. In "Mirza" the protagonist kills his seven-year-old daughter,--"Takes Fatima by the neck, breaks it, and swings her about." The taste for atrocities seems to have been most highly developed at Oxford, where the students acted Goffe's outrageous plays and a Samuel Harding published "Sicily and Naples," a medley introducing revenge for a father, a maiden disguised as a boy, a villain-favorite, the Mariana device, and combining rape, murder, madness, and incest in a fashion not equaled since "Titus Andronicus." Absurd plays of this sort were common enough from the days of "Cambyses," and cannot be fairly taken as evidences of the drama's decadence. Nor do the main differences that are apparent between tragedy after 1620 and that of the early or of the Shakespearean period point to decadence as unmistakably as critics are wont to assume. There is a waning of poetic power; blank verse descends to prose, and its flowers have a jaded air; but there is poetic imagination in Glapthorne as well as in Shirley, noble rhetoric in Massinger, and sheer poetry in Ford. The ethical tone has in general suffered deterioration. The moral insight of Shakespeare or even of Webster is not maintained; courtly and sophisticated ideals ring false; the language becomes gross; the vulgarities of the early plays are replaced by mawkish sentimentality or lewd suggestiveness. There seems to be increasing difficulty in presenting persons normally good. The reiteration of scenes of rape and seduction bespeak an unhealthy moral atmosphere. Yet tragedy, though at tunes perverse or forgetful, still clings to its moral standards. It still endeavors to expose and chastise sin and to incite to virtue.