row walls vanish so that we feel as if we hung in the infinite abyss of space, and the little world were but a tiny point of sparkling light which we can shut out with our

hand.

Massinger had nothing of the coward in him, and never lets his respect for rank put its timeserving hand over the mouth of his fealty to truth and virtue. He felt himself to be a peer of the realm of nature, a lord spiritual in an establishment as eternal as Truth itself, one of those nobles whose patent we can read in their faces, in the tone of their voice, in the grasp of their hand; who rule over their fellow-men by a divine right which not even time and death dare dispute, and who leave the outward distinctions of a conventional littleness to such as can best fashion realities out of such

pretty fictions. Often he swoops down upon some knighted vice, some meanness skulking behind a star-breasted coat, or some beduked infamy, and sometimes, like an eagle in a dovecot, flutters even the dwellers within the sacred precincts of the court itself. Yet, while he does not bend cap in hand before an outward and customary superiority, he has none of that arrogant assumption of equality which is indeed the basest and most degrading kind of aristocracy. Freedom is all that men can lay claim to in common, and that is no true manhood which needs comparison with others to set it off. Massinger, as we have said, is eminent for his gentlemanlike feeling, and the true gentleman is he who knows, and knows how to gain for himself without an exaction what is his due, rather than he who gives their dues to others.The latter needs but an exercise of justice, and is, indeed, included in the former, which must needs be endowed with patience, gentleness, humble dignity, and all the honorable and virtuous adornments of a wise and courageous humanity.

We shall copy here a few random passages from all his plays, both to illustrate what we have said and what we have yet to say of our poet.

CHARITY.

look on the poor With gentle eyes! for in such habits often Angels desire an alms.

AN UNCONQUERED MIND.

He that hath stood

The roughest battery that captivity
Could ever bring to shake a constant temper,
Despised the fawnings of a future greatness
By beauty in her full perfection tendered,
That hears of death as of a quiet slumber,
And from the surplusage of his own firmness
Can spare enough of fortitude to assure
A feeble woman, will not, Mustapha
Be altered in his soul by any torments
We can afflict his body with.

*

VOX POPULI NOT ALWAYS VOX DEI.

Extraordinary virtues, when they soar
Too high a pitch for common sights to judge of,
Losing their proper splendor, are condemned
For most remarkable vices.

The following fine passage is a good specimen of Massinger's most fiery style. It has none of that volcanic aspect which startles us into admiring wonder in Chapman, whose rustling vines and calm snowcapt head, which seems made to slumber in the peaceful blue, are on the sudden deluged with surging lava from the burning heart below, none of that lightning brilliance which blurs the eyes of our better critical judgement. It savors rather of the dignified indignation of Tully which never forgets that it has saved Rome, and would not jar the studied * taste of the porticoes or the Academy.

To you, Whom it does most concern, my lord, I will Address my speech, and, with a soldier's freedom, In my reproof, return the bitter scoff You threw upon my poverty: you contemned My coarser outside, and from that concluded (As by your groom you made me understand) I was unworthy to sit at your table Among these tissues and embroideries, Unless I changed my habit: I have done it, And shew myself in that which I have worn In the heat and fervor of a bloody fight; And then it was in fashion, not (as now) Ridiculous and despised. This hath past through A wood of pikes, and every one aimed at it, Yet scorned to take impression of their fury: With this, as still you see it, fresh and new I've charged through fire that would have singed your sables,

Black fox and ermines, and changed the proud

color

Of scarlet though of the right Tyrian die.—
But now, as if the trappings made the man,
Such only are admired as come adorned
With what's no part of them. This is mine own,
My richest suit, a suit I must not part from,
But not regarded now: and yet, remember
'Tis we that bring you in the means of feasts,
Banquets and revels, which when you possess,

*We do not mean to imply any artifiality like the foresighted pathos of Sheridan's "My gods!" or the coughs of the famous Oliver Maillard, in the manuscript of whose sermon preached at Bruges in 1500, the words "Hem, hem, hem," are inserted at certain intervals. See note in Du Chat's Rabelais.

With barbarous ingratitude you deny us

To be made sharers in the harvest which Our sweat and industry reaped and sowed for you.

The silks you wear, we with our blood spin for

you;

This massy plate, that with the ponderous weight
Doth make your cupboards crack,we (unaffrighted
With tempests, or the long and tedious way,
Or dreadful monsters of the deep that wait
With open jaws still ready to devour us)
Fetch from the other world. Let it not then
In after ages to your shame be spoken
That you with no relenting eyes look on
Our wants that feed your plenty; or consume,
In prodigal and wanton gifts on drones,
The kingdom's treasure, yet detain from us
The debt tlrat with the hazard of our lives
We have made you stand engaged for; or force us,
Against all civil government, in armor
To require that which with all willingness
Should be tendered ere demanded.

But, after all, such few gleanings as we can make in the way of extracts, can give us but a limited idea of the quality of the field. The general impression gathered from the man's whole works will be nearer the truth. It is the more likely to be so because in Massinger's plays the whole power of the man is plainly put forth. We do not feel in reading him, that he was "A budding star, that might have grown Into a sun when it had blown."* There is nothing rugged or precipitous in his genius, no peaks that lose themselves in the clouds, all is smooth, table land, with scarce an unevenness of surface. We never could say which of his plays was our favorite. This sustained vigor shows strength and unweariedness of mind rather than high poetic genius. Genius seems to want stedfastness, not by sinking below its proper pitch, but from the instinct which forever goads it to soar higher and higher.

In the best of Massinger's characters we seem to have a true, unconscious picture of himself, a photographic likeness, as it were, of his soul when the sunshine was upon it. We mean in their speeches, for their actions are held in utter serfdom by the plot, which Massinger seems to have considered sovereign by divine right. To change their entire nature seems but a light exercise of their loyalty, and they would drink up Eysell or eat a crocodile for the gratification of their liege lord with pleased alacrity. There is but little variety in his leading characters, and they are all plainly Philip Massinger. It has often been said that the greatest genius never thus reproduces itself. Byron felt this to be true, as is clear from the uneasiness he showed when the masks of his various characters were torn away and disclosed beneath the narrow features of the peer. The true test seems to us the sameness rather than the portraiture of self, for genius must draw from within, and it differs from other natures not in being of a higher kind but in that it contains all others.† Which of Shakspeare's characters shall we say is Shakspeare? — and yet, which shall we say is not? Round the brow of all Byron's heroes we can trace a scarlet token of the pressure of a coronet. That little imaginary golden circle had ample room and verge enough for the poet's soul;- what, save the emblem of eternity, could have been a proper fillet for that of Shakspeare?

To return to Massinger. There is a great deal of nobleness about him, and often we

ness.

catch the lingering savor of a rich and fearless benignity which had been driven from its still home in his heart by the hard and bitter uses of the world. His nobleness is clearly his own, and not an outside virtue put on with his player's cloak and left in the wardrobe of the theatre folded up for fear of soiling. We say his nobleness is his own, for there is a nobleness which is not noble, a fair-weather greatness, springing from without, whereby a man is wafted to honorable deeds by the prosperous breath of friends' applause, or is spurred on thereto by a pitiful emulation of the laurels rather than of the nature of a true, inborn worthiNobleness emulates itself only, and shows as majestic in its own sight as in that of the world. It is humble enough to think God as good society as man. We do not mean that the glorified lives and deaths of the great souls who have gone before it are not to be a staff and a help to the noble spirit, but we deem that but a bastard greatness which must take root in the past, fearing to trust its seeds to the dim future, and preferring the beggarly Outward to the infinite Within. It is out of this meagre soil that the desire of fame springs, which has never yet achieved auglit for the advancement of the race, and which seems rather to be a quality of the body than of the soul. The soul is put here to purify and elevate itself, and thereby the universal soul of man; and it needs no outward token of reverence, since it carries with it an inward record and badge of its having fulfilled its mission, more authentic than the palm branch of the pilgrim to Jerusalem, or the green turban of the Hadgi. But the body, having more sympathies with earth than with heaven, is forever haunted by a longing to leave behind it here some ponderous marble satire upon the short comings of its former tenant. The true poet feels nothing of this. Like his mother Nature, he casts down his seeds with a free and bounteous hand, and leaves them to the nursing of the sun and the rain, the wind and the dew. Massinger is clearly of a natively honorable and fair composition. He is one of those who could not help being noble, even if littleness were the whole world's ideal of beauty. His greatness was domestic wholly, and did not lean upon others. For what true Man asks the verdict of any soul but his own? Simple, selfforgetting majesty is one great charm of these old poets. It was natural and homely, and thought not of the reviews or the market-place. Its root is inward, but it blossoms and bears fruit outwardly in deeds and words of a lofty and godlike justice and simplicity. But for that other bastard usurping virtue, as its root is outward, would that its blossom and fruit might be

outward likewise, and so the soul be free from unsatisfied longings, from the gnawings of reproachful seeming, and all other

craven terrors..

One chief cause of the higher grandeur of the poesy of those days was that poets reverenced their calling, and did not lightly assume the holy name of seer—a name which, for some generations since, seems to have been mainly claimed and most readily conceded to those who could not see, so that what was once the type of all most awful and majestic things became a mock and a byeword, and those golden arrows which had slain the Pythian serpent and whose dreadful clang had sent fear through the bravest hearts of Greece, were either defiled and bedimmed by the foul venom of a crawling satire, or, reeking with wine, and feathered with courtly ribaldry, were launched feebly from the stews and bagnios at the hearts of Celias and Cloes whose Arcadia was the court of Charles II, and their Astraea redux, the duchess of Portsmouth. Our elder poets did so much talk of living for eternity as think of living in it, well knowing that time is not a point without it, but that now and in the soul of man is indeed the very centre on which that infinite circle can alone be described. In those days even the quacks had loftier ideas of their art and of the nobleness of life requisite to its practisers than many a poet now has of his.*

Massinger had a true and lofty feeling of the sacred calling of the poet. He thought rather of what he was born for than of himself. For, inasmuch as the poetic nature is more truly and fully expressed in a man, by so much is there less of individuality and personality about him. This nature exists in its highest and clearest beauty where the spirit of the man is wholly given up to the universal spirit, and the seer feels himself to be only the voice of something beyond thought and more sure than reason, something more awful and mysterious than can be arrived at by the uttermost gropings of the most unbounded and strongest-winged imagining. Somewhat lower than this, but in the same kind, is Art, which seems, after all definitions, to be merely the unconscious instinct of genius,

*Lilly, the astrologer, who sat for the portrait of Sidrophel in Hudibras, speaking of astrology, says "the study required in that kind of learning must be sedentary, of great reading, sound judgment, which no man can accomplish except he wholly retire, use prayer, and accompany himself with angelical visitations. (See his Autobiography.) So also Michael Sandivogius, in his "New Light of Alchymy," says "The searcher of Nature ought to be such as Nature herself is, true, plain, patient, constant; and that which is chiefest of all, religious, fearing God, not injurious to their neighbour."

that is of the healthiest and most natural nature.* Thus, in the hand of the true artist, the pen, the brush, or the chisel, seems rather to be in the all-powerful grasp of destiny herself, with so much swiftness and easy certainty does it body forth such baser and more outward portions of the overruling beauty as may be materially expressed, creating for the philosopher proofs of those universal laws which he is laboriously splicing out of separate facts. Only in the rapid flush of inspiration,- in the highest moments of the highest souls,is this perfect artistic unconsciousness attained to by man, for the spirit of God cannot flow through these channels of clay, without losing somewhat of its crystal clearness.

We have said that Massinger's attempts at humor generally sunk into grossness. There was no luxuriance in his character. He has none of that spiritual sensuousness which we so often find connected with the highest poetic faculty-a kind of rosy nakedness of Greek freedom which yet has no touch of immodesty in it. It is a faculty which belongs in perfection only to that evenly-balanced nature which gives its just right to both body and soul. It is as far removed from sensuality as from over delicacy, which may be called conventionalized grossness, since it keeps indeed its eyes and lips chaste as the icicle that hangs in Dian's temple, but has its heart and fancy thronging with prophetic pictures of all manner of uncleanness which may by any remote chance assail it. There is less immodesty in the stark nakedness of virtue than in the closest veil of vice.

Massinger has grossness enough, but none of this fine sensuality-this bodily feeling of the beautiful. Indeed, it is inconsistent with grossness, being but an entire fusion of body and spirit, so that we hear, see, smell, touch and taste, with the soul. It is a lifting of the body up to the soul's level, whereas grossness brings down the soul to that of the body. Poets who possess this instinct most fully are the best describers of outward and material nature, with which, through their bodily senses thus sublimated, they have a finer and wider sympathy. And it is not by going out of themselves into nature that they can, as it were, paint the very feelings of seemingly dead and senseless things, but rather

*Sir Thomas Browne calls "art the perfection of nature," and "nature the art of God."-. -Religio Medici.

+ Coleridge, hearing one speak of an argument between Mackintosh and somebody else which had been very long and intricate, exclaimed "If there had been a man of genius in the room he would have settled it in five minutes."-Hazlitt's Remains.

by taking her into and interpenetrating her with their own spirits, thus showing the true law of sympathy, which is to raise its objects to its own fullest height, and not to descend to theirs. Therefore in the best landscapes, even of the most desert and barren solitudes, the crowning charm seems to be a certain humanness which sympathizes with the highest wants of the soul, and has like feelings, it may be, of the sunlight and moonlight and all the vast harmonies of Nature. We did not look to find this faculty in Massinger. It has only been shown by our greatest poets. We find it in Chaucer, Spenser and Shakspeare eminently, and in our own day perhaps more in Keats than any other. Sometimes we see it reversed, and find the spirit sensualized, as in some of the poems of Crashawe, a man of impure youth and Magdalen age, by whom the marriage of the soul with the Savior is celebrated in strains better befitting an earthly Epithalamium.

ear.

Massinger's style is manly, strong and straightforward. He writes blank-verse remarkably well for a man whose lyrics and other attempts at rhyme prove him to have been entirely destitute of any musical Sometimes, when he imitates the favorite trick of Fletcher, and ends his lines with what may be termed a spondee, his verse has a show of more grace than is usual with him. As in the two following passages, which have moreover a great tenderness of sentiment.

Good madam, for your health's sake, clear these clouds up

That feed upon your beauty like diseases.
Time's hand will turn again, and what he ruins
Gently restore, and wipe off all your sorrows.
Believe, you are to blaine, much to blame, lady;
You tempt his loving care whose eye has numbered
All our afflictions and the time to cure them:
You rather with this torrent choke his mercies,
Than gently slide into his providence.
Sorrows are well allowed, and sweeten nature
When they express no more than drops on lilies;
But, when they fall in storms, they bruise our hopes,
Make us unable, though our comforts meet us,
To hold our heads up: come, you shall take comfort;
This is a sullen grief becomes condemned men,
That feel a weight of sorrow through their souls:
Do but look up. Why, so! is not this better
Than hanging down your head still like a violet
And dropping out those sweet eyes for a wager?

In this passage, sixteen out of the nineteen lines end in the manner indicated above. Again,

Not far from where my father lives, a lady,
A neighbor by, blest with as great a beauty
As nature durst bestow without undoing,
Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then,
And blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in.
This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,
Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,
In all the bravery my friends could show me,
In all the faith mine innocence could give me,
In the best language my true tongue could tell me,

And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued and served. Long did I love this lady, Long was my travail, long my trade to win her; With all the duty of my soul I served her.

We now and then meet in his plays some of those forced conceits which became so fashionable a short time after in the writ

ings of what has been (rather inaptly) called "the metaphysical school," who would borrow the shears of Atropos to snip off a flower of speech, and seem to have taken more pains to "cast a figure" than ever astrologers did. We copy one speci

men.

My much loved lord, were Margaret only fair,
The cannon of her more than earthly form,
Though mounted high, commanding all beneath it,
And rammed with bullets of her sparkling eyes,
Of all the bulwarks that defend your senses
Could batter none but that which guards your sight.

This is as bad as some of the gallant Wyatt's sonnets, or as that prison which King Thibaud the troubadour tells us he was locked in "of which Love keeps the key, aided by his three bailiffs Hope Deferred, Beauty and Anxiety." Chapman sometimes indulges his fancy in the same way; but in him it seems like the play of a giant heaping Ossa on Pelion. Butler, a man of genius and sturdy English feeling, was wont to say, Aubrey tells us, that "that way (e. g. Edm. Waller's) of quibling with sence will hereafter growe as much out of fashion and be as ridicule as quibling with wordes." If all English poets had maintained their loyalty to our glorious tongue as fearlessly as Butler did* and had not so sheepishly allowed halfpenny critics to be the best judges of an art as far above them as the glorious lyre which nightly burns in Heaven, our lections of Poets" would not have been so much like catacombs of withered anatomies, which fall to dust under our touch.

"col

We finish our extracts with the following from the "Roman Actor," which shews that Massinger had a true feeling of the independence of the poet and of the stage, and that he esteemed the latter (what it doubtless is when rightly conducted) a good helper in the cause of virtue and refinement.

-But, 'tis urged That we corrupt youth, and traduce superiors

*See his poems "On Critics," and "On our ridiculous imitation of the French" in especial.

When do we bring a vice upon the stage
That does go off unpunished? Do we teach,
By the success of wicked undertakings,
Others to tread in their forbidden steps?
We show no arts of Lydian panderism,
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries,
But mulcted so in the conclusion, that
Even those spectators that were so inclined
That are above us, publishing to the world
Go home changed men. And, for traducing such

Their secret crimes, we are as innocent
As such as are born dumb. When we present
An heir that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, nuinbering every hour
He lives as tedious to him; if there be
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould, WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adulteress,
That does maintain the riotous expense
Of him that feeds her greedy lust, yet suffers
The lawful pledges of a former bed

To starve the while for hunger; if a matron,
However great in fortune, birth, or titles
Guilty of such a foul, unnatural sin,

Cry out-'tis writ for me,- WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when a covetous man's exprest, whose wealth
Arithmetic cannot number, and whose lordships
A falcon in one day cannot fly over,
Yet he so sordid in his mind, so griping,
As not to afford himself the necessaries
To maintain life; if a patrician

(Though honored with a consulship) find himself
Touched to the quick in this,- WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when we show a judge that is corrupt,
And will give up the sentence, as he favors
The person not the cause, saving the guilty,
If of his faction, and as oft condemning
The innocent out of particular spleen, -
If any in this reverend assembly,

Nay, even yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Cæsar, feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past
Or things intended, -'TIS NOT IN US TO HELP IT.

And so, farewell, Philip Massinger!— Thou wast one of the deathless brotherhood who reared so fair a statue to the God of song, for the love and reverence ye bore him only, and not like Domitian, that your own images might show prominently on his bosom. Happy art thou now in thy nameless grave, free from the cark and care whose bitter rust prey most upon the poet's heart. Happy in that thou canst be praised without envy, and that thou art far removed from the carping of men who would measure all genius by their own standard, who respect the dead body more than the living soul, and who esteem contemporaneousness an excuse for malignity, grossness, and all other basenesses which disgracefully distinguish the man from the brute. Happy art thou there in the infinite peace and silence.

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