ne, & pray, & mend.

_Mac_. Letters shall forthwith fly into _Madrid_
To tell the King the storyes of Two Brothers,
Worthy the Courtiers reading. Lovers, take hands:
_Hymen_ & gentle faeryes strew your way:
Our Sessions turnes into a Bridall day.

_All_. Fare thee well, _Englishman_.

_Pike_. I will ring peales of prayers of you all,
My Lords & noble Dons.

_Mac_. Doe soe, if thou hast iust cause: howsoever,
When thy swift ship cutts through the curled mayne,
Dance to see _England_, yet speake well of _Spayne_.

_Pike_. I shall.--Where must I leave my pistoletts?

_Gent_. Follow mee.

[_Exeunt Omnes_.

FINIS.

INTRODUCTION TO _THE LADY MOTHER_.

The authorship of this anonymous play, now printed for the first time
(from Eg. MS. 1994), is not difficult to discover. Any one who has had
the patience to read the Plays of Henry Glapthorne cannot fail to be
amused by the bland persistence with which certain passages are
reproduced in one play after another. Glapthorne's stock of fancies was
not very extensive, but he puts himself to considerable pains to make
the most of them. In _The Lady Mother_ we find the same ornaments spread
out before us, many of them very tawdry at their best. Glapthorne's
editor has striven to show that the weak-kneed playwright was a
fellow-pupil of John Milton's at St. Paul's. One cannot think of the two
names together without calling to mind the "lean and flashy songs" and
"scrannel pipes of wretched straw" in _Lycidas_.

Yet Glapthorne was a man of some parts. He had little enough dramatic
power, but he writes occasionally with tenderness and feeling. In his
poetical garden rank weeds choke up the flower-beds; but still, if we
have patience to pursue the quest, we may pick here and there a
musk-rose or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken
Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran
performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the _Grateful Servant_,
a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry
faded graces of the _Lady's Privilege_.

A note at the end of _The Lady Mother_ in the hand-writing of William
Blagrave, acting for the Master of the Revels, shows that the play was
licensed in October, 1635. From a passage in II., 1, it would seem to
have been produced at the Salisbury Court Theatre in Whitefriars. In the
same year Glapthorne's comedy of the _Hollander_, according to th