better.-COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1840, The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford, Introduction, p. lviii.

His most splendid successes are in the handling of subjects which are, in themselves, unwritten tragedies -the deepest distresses of the heart and the terrible aberrations of the passions. His works make a sad, deep, and abiding impression on the mind, though hardly one that is pleasing or healthy. He had little of that stalwart strength of mind, and heedless daring, which characterize the earlier dramatists.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1846, Old English Dramatists, Essays and Reviews, vol. II, p. 70.

In fulness and fine equability Ford was far below Massinger; but in intensity, in the power of making an audience miserable and moving them to tears, he was thought to excel him. Indeed the reputation of lugubriousness had attached itself to him personally. MASSON, DAVID, 1858, The Life of John Milton, vol. 1, ch. vi.

By Ford, incidents of the most revolting kind are laid down as the foundation of his plots, upon which he wastes a pathos and tenderness deeper than is elsewhere found in the drama.-BOTTA, ANNE C. LYNCH, 1860–84, Hand-Book of Universal Literature, p. 481.

Ford's blank verse is not so imposing as Massinger's; but it has often a delicate beauty, sometimes a warbling wildness and richness, beyond anything in Massinger's fuller swell.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of The English Language, vol. 1, p. 606.

He would not seem to have looked at his plays from the point of view of his audience, or to have exerted himself to stir their interest or to keep it from flagging. There is a certain haughtiness of touch even in his language; sometimes a repudiation of emphasis, as if he did not care to be impressive on a slight occasion; sometimes a wilful abstruseness, as if it mattered nothing though his words were misunderstood. This alone is often the cause of considerable reaches of dull dialogue-dull, that is to say, for the purposes of the stage.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1874-85, Characteristics of English Poets, p. 361.

He stands apart among his fellows,

without master or follower; he has learnt little from Shakespeare or Marlowe, Jonson or Fletcher. . The

poetry of Ford is no branch or arm of that illimitable sea; it might rather be likened to a mountain lake shut in by solitary highlands, without visible outlet or inlet, seen fitlier by starlight than by sunlight; much such an one as the Lac de Gaube above Cauterets, steel-blue and sombre, with a strange attraction for the swimmer in its cold smooth reticence and breathless calm. For nothing is more noticeable in this poet than the passionless reason and equable tone of style with which in his greatest works he treats of the deepest and most fiery passions, the quiet eye with which he searches out the darkest issues of emotion, the quiet hand with which he notes them down. At all times his verse is even and regular, accurate and composed; never specially flexible or melodious, always admirable for precision, vigour, and purity. . No poet is less forgetable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pass by; you cannot fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls as though direct from heaven upon stray lines and phrases of some poets falls never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by resolution.. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a great hand he won the place he holds against all odds. of rivalry in a race of rival giants. In that gallery of monumental men and mighty memories, among or above the fellows of his godlike craft, the high figure of Ford stands steadily erect; his name is ineffaceable from the scroll of our great writers; it is one of the loftier landmarks of English poetry.-SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1875, John Ford, Essays and Studies, pp. 276, 277, 312.

He carried to an extreme the tendency of the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so with very great power. He has no comic humour, but no man has described better the worn and tortured human heart.-BROOKE, STOPFORD, 1876, English Literature Primer, p. 92.

What Ford especially imitated from Greene was the art of writing romantic tales with plenty of adventures, unexpected meetings and discoveries, much love, and improbabilities enough to enchant Elizabethan readers and sell the book up to any number of editions. In this he rivalled his model very successfully, and his romances were among the most popular of the time of Shakespeare. The number of their editions was extraordinary, and they were renewed at almost regular intervals up to the eighteenth century; there was a far greater demand for them than for any play of Shakespeare.-JusSERAND, J. J., 1890, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 193.

He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never-to my mindmaking head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of pathos of quiet contemplative brooding-lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do not compensate-at least do not compensate me for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands Letters and Kings, From Elizabeth to Anne, p. 91.

In reading him again after a long interval, with elements of wider comparison, and provided with more trustworthy tests, I find that the greater part of what I once took on trust as precious is really paste and pinchbeck. His plays seem to me now to be chiefly remarkable for that filigree-work of sentiment which we call

sentimentality. The word "alchemy" once had a double meaning. It was used to signify both the process by which lead could be transmuted into gold, and the alloy of baser metal by which gold could be adulterated without losing so much of its specious semblance as to be readily detected. The ring of the true metal can be partially imitated, and for a while its glow, but the counterfeit grows duller as the genuine grows brighter with wear. The greater poets have found out the ennobling secret, the lesser ones the trick of falsification. Ford seems to me to have been a master in it. He abounds especially in mock pathos. I remember when he thoroughly imposed on me.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1892, Massinger and Ford, The Old English Dramatists, ed. Norton, p. 128.

In the delineation of the strongest human passions-love, grief, revengeFord is without a peer among the later Elizabethan dramatists. He seeks, in own words, to

"Sing out a lamentable tale of things,

Done long ago, and ill done; and when sighs Are wearied, piece up what remains behind With weeping eyes and hearts that bleed to death."

He has no dramatic reserve, and shrinks from no touch of horror that can add intensity to the situation. It is in this that his want of due restraint betrays itself. A sane and healthy mind revolts instinctively from such scenes as that in which the reaking heart of Annabella is borne into the banquet-hall on the dagger of Giovanni; they awaken neither pity nor indignation, nor that purifying rest in accompished purpose, which is the highest end of tragedy. We are first stunned, then repelled, by the morbid fatalism of his greatest tragedies; they are like the hospital-museums where human deformities and distortions are catalogued and exhibited, and from which we long to escape into the fresh air and sunshine.-MASTERMAN, J. HOWARD B., 1897, The Age of Milton, p. 83.

Last of all, in a final brief blaze of the sinking embers, we encounter John Ford, perhaps as genuine a tragic poet as any one of his forerunners, Shakespeare alone excepted, reverting for a moment to the old splendid diction, the haughty disregard of convention, the contempt for ethical restrictions. And so the brief and

magnificent school of English drama, begun by Marlowe scarcely more than a generation before, having blazed and crackled like a forest fire fed with resinous branches,

sinks almost in a moment, and lingers only as a heap of white ash and glowing charcoal. GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 138.

PERSONAL

As to my long stay in these parts, ye shall impute it [rather] to so sociable a company, from whom I am even loth to depart, than to a wilful neglect of promised coming to you. Fortune this last day was so favourable as by plain blindness to acquaint me with that most excellent spirit and rarest gem of our North, S. W. A. [Sir William Alexander]; for, coming near his house, I had almost been a Christian father to one of his children. He accepted me so kindly, and made me so good an entertainment (which, whatsomever, with him I could not have thought but good), that I cannot well show. Tables removed, after Homer's fashion weil satiate, he honoured me so much as to show me his books and papers. This much I will say, and perchance not without reason dare say: he hath done more in one day than Tasso did all his life and Bartas in his two weeks, though both one and the other be most praiseworthy. I esteemed of him, before I was acquaint with him, because of his works; but I protest henceforth I will esteem of his works because of his own good, courteous, meek disposition. He entreated me to have made longer stay; and, believe me, I was as sorry to depart as a new enamoured lover would be from his mistress.-DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, 1614, Letter, Life by Masson, p. 41.

So Scotland sent us hither for our own

The

That man whose name I ever would have known

To stand by mine, that most ingenious knight,
My Alexander, to whom in his right

I want extremely, yet in speaking thus
I do but show the love that was 'twixt us,
And not his numbers, which were brave and
high,

So like his mind was his clear poesie. -DRAYTON, MICHAEL, C1627, Of Poets and Poesie.

The purity of this gentleman's vein was quite spoiled by the corruptness of his courtiership; and so much the greater pity; for by all appearance, had he been contented with that mediocrity of fortune he was born unto, and not aspired to those grandeurs of the court, which could not without pride be prosecuted, nor maintained without covetousness, he might have made a far better account of himself. It did not satisfie his ambition to have a laurel from the Muses, and to be esteemed a king amongst poets, but he must be king of some new-found-land; and, like another Alexander indeed, searching after new worlds, have the soveraignty of Nova Scotia. URQUHART, SIR THOMAS, 1652, Σκσκνβαλαυρου : or, the Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, p. 207.

So this the end of our long acquaintance with Alexander of Menstrie. On the whole, we must pronounce him about the

most unfortunate Scot of his time. Better for his memory had he died long ago, when he was still only Alexander of Menstrie, or at least no more than that Sir William Alexander, "the rarest gem of our north," with whom it had been such a delight to Drummond to have that first meeting in the Clackmannanshire mansion in 1614, when they revelled over books and papers, and became Damon and Alexis to each other. What had all the intermediate courtiership and climbing, with the Scottish Secretaryship, the Novia Scotia Charter, the Viscountcy, the Earldom, the splendid new family edifice at Stirling, been really worth? It had been all per metre, per turners, all by a dirty application of talent, all at the expense of the growing hatred of his countrymen at every step, and, what was worst, with no such countervailing consciousness of right, nor even such iron wilfulness in wrong, as have borne up better or stronger men through that form of calamity. If the hatred had lessened at the end, it had only been because much of it had been turned into contemptuous pity. Broken down by the loss of two of his sons, deep in debt, and with the future of his family overclouded, he had persevered through the First Bishop's War in the routine of his fatal Secretaryship, to become a kind of underling at last of Hamilton and Traquair in arranging the new onslaught on Scotland. which the King had decreed. That was his final appearance in the world. All that one sees more is the ship toiling along the eastern coast with the leaden coffin in her hold, and the farther conveyance of the same up the windings of the Forth, to be laid, at dead of night, beside the other coffins in the vault in Stirling Church. There he lies, I suppose, to this day, vaguely remembered as the second-rate Scottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism, and the author of a larger quantity of fluent and stately English verse which no one reads. -MASSON, DAVID, 1873, Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 328.

Though string'd with starres heavens Orpheus' harpe enrolle,

More worthy thine to blaze about the Pole. -DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, 1614, To Sir William Alexander, Verses Prefixed to Doomesday.

The Occasion of his being mention'd in our Catalogue, is, from "four Monarchick Tragedies," (as he stiles them,) which are in print under his Name, viz. "The Alexandræan Tragedy," "Cræsus," "Darius," and "Julius Cæsar." These Plays seem to be writ with great Judgment, and (if I mistake not) the Author has propos'd the Ancients, for his l'attern; by bringing in the Chorus between the Acts. They are grave, and sententious, throughout, like the Tragedies of Seneca; and yet where the softer, and more tender Passions are touch't, they seem as moving, as the Plays so much in vogue with the Ladies of this Age. The greatest objection that I know against them, is the Choice the Author has made of his Verse, which is alternate, like the Quatrains of the French Poet Pibrach; or Sr. William Davenant's Heroick Poem, call'd “Gondibert."-LANGBAINE, GERARD, 1691, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets.

Enjoyed a higher reputation than Drummond in his time. His monarchical tragedies are full of ostentatious morality, diffused through smooth, rhetorical stanzas, without a single spark of celestial fire.-LAING, MALCOLM, 1800-4, The History of Scotland, vol. III, p. 477.

Wrote some very heavy tragedies; but there is elegance of expression in a few of his shorter pieces.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

He is rather the poet of sentiment than of imagination: his works are less frequently distinguished by bold flights of fancy, than by a philosophical vein of reflection; but he often displays considerable vigour of conception, and expresses his thoughts with suitable force and dignity. The Earl of Orford has characterized him as a poet "greatly superior to the age" and if we compare him with such writers as Donne and Cowley, he certainly appears to no small advantage. His style, though not entirely free from Scoticisms, and from harsh combinations, is frequently conspicuous for its nervous simplicity.-IRVING, DAVID, 1861, History of Scotish Poetry, ed. Carlyle, p. 522,

The chief literary beauties of these plays consist in their lyrical passages, which however are unequal in excellence, and weary by the sameness of their themes. The cadence of the quatrains which build up the dialogue is frequently pleasing, and its turns are often felicitous; but the general effect remains that of a volume of speech extremely prolix, and marred by affectations of style as well as by defects of construction and by occasional lapses into baldness of expression. The aid of antithesis and of alliteration is frequently called in, without any signal advantage being gained in the way of variety of effect. Elevated in tone, and often vigorous as well as dignified in sentiment, and manifesting the operation of an observing mind together with the influence of a carefully trained taste, these tragedies retain no interest for anybody but the literary student, whom alone they can be supposed to have been originally intended to please.-WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1875-99, A History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 625.

Broadly, his poems are weighty with thought after the type of Fulk Greville, Lord Brooke, though scarcely so obscure as his. His tragedies have "brave translunary things," if laboured and dull as a whole. His "Avrora" and minor pieces are elegant and musical. There is less of conceit in the merely conceitful sense than was common with contemporaries, and if you only persevere, opalescent hues edge long passages otherwise comparable with mist and fog. As a man he grows in our regard the nearer one gets at the facts. Manlier speech never was addressed to kings than by him in his "Parænesis" and "Tragedies" and elsewhere. His "noble poverty" is the best vindication of his integrity. He stands above. any contemporary Scot, alike in many

sidedness and strenuousness of character. -GROSART, A. B., 1885, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. I, p. 280.

Alexander had indeed more power of sustained versification than his friend Drummond, though he hardly touches the latter in point of the poetical merit of short isolated passages and poems. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 311.

The sonnets never reach a high level. They betray in numerous ingenuities of

fancy and expression the "conceitie braine," and have all the artificiality and more than all the monotony to be looked for in so long a series devoted to the praises of a mistress and lamentations of her cruelty. . . . The "Monarchicke Tragedies" are of all dramas the least dramatic. They are slow in movement, full of repetitions, destitute of living human characters, unfit alike for the stage and the study. Little or nothing is given as enacted; there is not even vigorous and progressive narrative, but, instead, windy commonplace reflections.

They stand apart from the true Elizabethan play with its abounding life, its vigorous action, its fulness of present interest. As little, perhaps even less, have they any vital relation to the classical drama. . . If Alexander sug

gests anybody in the annals of dramatic composition it is Lorde Brooke; and that because of common defects rather than common merits. The works of both are equally preposterous as plays; but Alexander's have not the power and weight of thought which half redeems Lord Brooke's tragedies.

"Parænesis to Prince Henry," a poem of considerable length on the duties of a king. It has been extravagantly praised; but the grounds of the panegyric are hard to discover. There is evidence of considerable learning, of keen intelligence, and on the whole of more independence of mind than was to be expected from a courtier in the court of James. "Doomesday," which

in length almost rivals the other works of its author collectively and in dreariness, surpasses all.-WALKER, HUGH, 1893, Three Centuries of Scottish Literature, vol. I, pp. 135, 136, 137, 138.

An undue neglect has hitherto been Alexander's fortune at the hands of literary appraisers. For this the great extent of his writings is largely to blame, hiding the grains of gold in an earthen bed. But the insight, wisdom, and independent spirit, apart from the frequent beauties of his work, must always make even his longest poems worth perusal, and among the monuments of his time and of Scotland a niche of high honour of his own must remain to the Earl of Stirling as distinctively the poet-counsellor of kings. EYRE-TODD, GEORGE, 1895, Scottish Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, p. 74.