THE foremost characteristic of Massinger, as we gather it from his writings, is a refined and grave dignity, fired with a certain Sir Philip Sydneyism of chivalrous gentlemanliness, and highly-wrought courtesy. We use the word gentlemanliness in its first meaning, and not as the exponent of any particular artificial grade in society. Massinger respected rank as being, in most cases, the representative at least of an ancestral virtue, but he did not from the fineness of the coat judge of the nobility of the heart under it, nor predicate the clearness of the spirit upon that of the skin. If he have not so much outward independence of manner as some of his fellow-dramatists, yet the bitter friendlessness of his last moments proves that, in an age of patronage, he had not stooped to servility, which, as it starves the soul, so also does it take the more lavish care of the body whose pander and bawd it is. That great and noble heart, as it turned full of an almost overmastering sorrow from a neglectful world swarmed

WALLER.

with buzzing temporalities, to the peaceful welcome home of eternal rest and silence, must have been taunted and mocked by a crowd of bitter memories. But it could yet bid farewell with an unshrinking and lofty majesty, being yet more a king, and over wider realms, in its dethronement than in the fullness of its sway, since it could not be reproached with one act of meanness or cowardice, or with ever having put the soul in pawn to satisfy the pampered cravings of the body. In all his poverty and low estate he did not bate a jot of heart or hope, for these can but reveal to the truly poetic spirit the full glory of its calling, giving it a more inward and cultured sympathy with the common wants and sorrows of humanity. How sublime becomes for us the pent up garret of the artist! How does the remembrance of the mighty soul which toiled there—of that thoughtful brow and those serene, eternal looking eyes from which the spirit of an age, rather than of a single man seems gazing-make the nar