hand of Rowley may be traced, not indeed in the more
high-toned passages, but in many of the most animated scenes of "The
Spanish Gipsy." In the most remarkable of the ten masks or interludes
which appear among the collected works of Middleton the two names are
again associated. To the freshness, liveliness, and spirited ingenuity
of this little allegorical comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in
his excellent critical introduction. "The Inner-Temple Masque," less
elaborate than "The World Tost at Tennis," shows no lack of homely humor
and invention: and in the others there is as much waste of fine flowing
verse and facile fancy as ever excited the rational regret of a modern
reader at the reckless profusion of literary power which the great poets
of the time were content to lavish on the decoration or exposition of an
ephemeral pageant. Of Middleton's other minor works, apocryphal or
genuine, I will only say that his authorship of "Microcynicon"--a dull
and crabbed imitation of Marston's worst work as a satirist--seems to me
utterly incredible. A lucid and melodious fluency of style is the mark
of all his metrical writing; and this stupid piece of obscure and clumsy
jargon could have been the work of no man endowed with more faculty of
expression than informs or modulates the whine of an average pig. Nor is
it rationally conceivable that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some
reams of paper with what he was pleased to consider or to call a
paraphrase of the "Wisdom of Solomon" can have had anything but a poet's
name in common with a poet. This name is not like that of the great
writer whose name is attached to "The Transformed Metamorphosis": there
can hardly have been two Cyril Tourneurs in the field, but there may
well have been half a dozen Thomas Middletons. And Tourneur's abortive
attempt at allegoric discourse is but a preposterous freak of prolonged
eccentricity: this paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable sea
of limitless and inexhaustible drivel. There are three reasons--two of
them considerable, but the third conclusive--for assigning to Middleton
the two satirical tracts in the style of Nash, or rather of Dekker,
which appeared in the same year with his initials subscribed to their
prefatory addresses. Mr. Dyce thought they were written by the poet
whose ready verse and realistic humor are both well represented in their
text: Mr. Bullen agrees with Mr. Dyce in thinking that they are the
work of Mi