terior laws which the mind, in its
creative action, instinctively divines and spontaneously obeys. In his
case, the appeal is not to the understanding alone, but to the feelings
and faculties which were concerned in producing the work itself; and the
symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who could not frame an
argument to sustain it. The laws to which his genius submitted were
different from those to which other dramatists had submitted, because
the time, the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at, were
different. The time demanded a drama which should represent human life
in all its diversity, and in which the tragic and comic, the high and
the low, should be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The
dramatists of whom we are about to speak represented them in
juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally combining them so as to
produce symmetrical works. Their comedy and tragedy, their humor and
passion, move in parallel rather than in converging lines. They have
diversity; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor tends to, a
central principle of organization or of order, the result is often a
splendid anarchy of detached scenes, more effective as detached than as
related. Shakespeare alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned
imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable materials of his
drama, to organize this anarchy into a new and most complex order, and
to make a world-wide variety of character and incident consistent with
oneness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his work this
organic form, put forth his whole strength to give it mechanical
regularity; every line in his solidest plays costing him, as the wits
said, "a cup of sack." But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a
force that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into their
elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new substance, is a force
so different in kind from Jonson's, that it would of course be idle to
attempt an estimate of its superiority in degree. And in regard to those
minor dramatists who will be the subjects of the present paper, if they
fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly all afford scenes and
passages superior to his best in depth of passion, vigor of imagination,
and audacious self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart.

The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was
Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, excep