less
imaginative people. Shakespeare knew the force of signs: a "malignant
and turbaned Turk." This "meal-cap miller," says the author of God's
Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious
outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of the fair
Marieta.

* * * * *

AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

_The Merry Devil of Edmonton_.--The scene in this delightful comedy,
in which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend,"
touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader
happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to
this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only
in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler,
than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How
delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that
Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend reminds
him! I wish it could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for
believing, that Michael Drayton was the author of this piece. It
would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my
native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the
fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left
a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honorable
mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion
beyond the dreams of old mythology.

* * * * *

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

_A Woman Killed with Kindness_.--Heywood is a sort of _prose_
Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But
we miss _the poet_, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and
above the surface of _the nature_. Heywood's characters, in this
play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we
see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakspeare makes us
believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are
nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem
old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

_The English Traveller_.--Heywood's preface to this play is
interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the opinion of
posterity, which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There
is a magnanimity in authorship, as in everything else. His ambition
seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players
speak his li