nes while he lived. It does not appear that he ever
contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a
slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of
such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and
the Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that
a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

* * * * *

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A Fair Quarrel_.--The insipid levelling morality to which the modern
stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as
these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment,
a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the
vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which
the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could
discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a
beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is
hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never
so absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre
to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the
amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of
disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic
morality, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble
of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the
boundaries of honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance
which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to
be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when
that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering,
to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which
the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen
an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done, in a feigned
story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater
delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to
the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of
honor as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against
duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far
better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honor;