, whom
he loves with a Platonic devotion. It is as unanticipated as the
discovery, in Jonson's "Silent Woman," that Epicaene is no woman at all,
while at the same time it has less the appearance of artifice, and is
more the result of natural causes.

With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the reader's
interest to his fable, harsher in versification, and generally clumsier
in construction, the best plays of Thomas Middleton are still superior
to Heywood's in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of
matter. It must, however, be admitted that the sentiments which direct
his powers are not so fine as Heywood's. He depresses the mind, rather
than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a
sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His
observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and
unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart
of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt
and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he
conceives his whole work is performed. This criticism applies even to
his tragedy of "Women beware Women," a drama which shows a deep study of
the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in exhibiting the
passions in their consecutive, if not in their conflicting action, and a
firm hold upon character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity;
its power is out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters,
while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen through no
visionary medium of sentiment and fancy; and the reader feels the force
of Leantio's own agonizing complaint, that his affliction is

"Of greater weight than youth was made to bear,
As if a punishment of after-life
Were fall'n upon man here, so new it is
To flesh and blood, so strange, so insupportable."

There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind; and the hard, bald
caustic peculiarity of his genius, which is unpleasingly felt in
reading any one of his plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as
we plod doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works. Like the
incantations of his own witches, it "casts a thick scurf over life." It
is most powerfully felt in his tragedy of "The Changeling," at once the
most oppressive and impressive effort of his genius. The character of De
Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of iniquity, such