s
immediate precursor: but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a burlesque to
pass muster even as a blasphemous travestie of the sacred text of
Sophocles. In the fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope with
no such matchless models or precursors; and it is perhaps the brightest
and most interesting of the five. Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing
understudy of Thersites: his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely
diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of
the typical traitress; and though time and space are wanting for the
development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic
character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its
simple fashion: the complicated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime
and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward
lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.

In "Love's Mistress; or, The Queen's Masque," the stage chronicler or
historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet:
his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity
and spirit, simplicity and vivacity. The framework or setting of these
five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is
sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue: the
story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more
graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Moliere and Corneille;
though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite
love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and
replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless
Theophile's. The fortunes of Psyche in English poetry have been as
curious and various as her adventures on earth and elsewhere. Besides
and since this pretty little play of Heywood's, she has inspired a long
narrative poem by Marmion, one of the most brilliant and independent of
the younger comic writers who sat at the feet or gathered round the
shrine of Ben Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutchman's poet
laureate, than which nothing more portentous in platitude ever crawled
into print, and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wooden verse
evoked from Shadwell's great predecessor in the office of court
rhymester an immortalizing reference to "Prince Nicander's vein"; a
magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty example of metrical romance
by Morris.

"Inexp