n this I hold it better far,
To keep the course we run, than, seeking change,
Hazard our lives, our honors, and the realm.

It seems hardly credible to those who are aware how much they owe to the
excellent scholarship and editorial faculty of Mr. Dyce, that he should
have allowed such a misprint as "heirs" for "honors" to stand in this
last unlucky line. Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader
Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country folk who are startled at
the sight of his insurgent array, he is made to utter (in reply to the
exclamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the perfectly fatuous phrase,
"Fear not good speech." Of course--once more--we should read, "Fear not,
good people"; a correction which rectifies the metre as well as the
sense.

The play attributed to Webster and Rowley by a publisher of the next
generation has been carefully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our
own time, who naturally finds it easy to distinguish the finer from the
homelier part of the compound weft, and to assign what is rough and
crude to the inferior, what is interesting and graceful to the superior
poet. The authority of the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the outline
or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it is either no authority at
all, or at best it is a "demd" authority. The same swindler who assigned
to Webster and Rowley the authorship of "A Cure for a Cuckold" assigned
to Shakespeare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely inferior
play--a play of which German sagacity has discovered that "none of
Rowley's other works are equal to this." Assuredly they are not--in
utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel. Rowley
was a vigorous artist in comedy and an original master of tragedy: he
may have written the lighter or broader parts of the play which rather
unluckily took its name from these, and Webster may have written the
more serious or sentimental parts: but there is not the slightest shadow
of a reason to suppose it. An obviously apocryphal abortion of the same
date, attributed to the same poets by the same knave, has long since
been struck off the roll of Webster's works.

The few occasional poems of this great poet are worth study by those who
are capable of feeling interest in the comparison of slighter with
sublimer things, and the detection in minor works of the same style,
here revealed by fitful hints in casual phrases, as that which animates
and distinguishes ev