him
But I bleed with it.

This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as traceable in the earlier
as in the later of Heywood's extant works: he is English of the English
in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, when suppression is no
longer either possible or proper, of all noble and gentle and natural
emotion. His passion and his pathos, his loyalty and his chivalry, are
always so unobtrusive that their modesty may sometimes run the risk of
eclipse before the glory of more splendid poets and more conspicuous
patriots: but they are true and trustworthy as Shakespeare's or Milton's
or Wordsworth's or Tennyson's or Browning's.

It was many a year before Dick Pike had earned the honor of
commemoration by his hand or by any other poet's that Heywood had won
his spurs as the champion presenter--if I may be allowed to revive the
word--of his humbler and homelier countrymen under the light of a no
less noble than simple realism. "The Fair Maid of the Exchange" is a
notable example of what I believe is professionally or theatrically
called a one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously unjust and
inept remark on Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII."--the play in which,
according to the principles or tenets of the new criticism which walks
or staggers by the new light of a new scholarship, "the new Shakspere"
may or must have been assisted by Flitcher (why not also by Meddletun,
Messenger, and a few other _novi homines?_), we may say, and it may be
said this time with some show of reason, that the genius of the author
limps in and limps out with the Cripple. Most of the other characters
and various episodical incidents of the incomposite story are alike, if
I may revive a good and expressive phrase of the period, hastily and
unskilfully slubbered up: Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate
example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from
him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived.
On the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two first-rate scenes and
passages to which Lamb has done perhaps no more than justice by the
characteristic and eloquent cordiality of his commendations. Its date
may be probably determined as early among the earliest of its author's
by the occurrence in mid-dialogue of a sestet in the popular metre of
"Venus and Adonis," with archaic inequality in the lengths of the second
and fourth rhyming words: a notable note of metrical or immetrical
anti