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 exuberant invention, the weight of thought and grave resonance of Chapman's gnomic lines. They could not afford to let their work run wild; they were bound not to write after the erratic fashion of their time. All the work of Massinger, all the serious work of Ford, is the work of an artist who respects alike himself, his art, and the reader or spectator who may come to study it. There is scarcely another dramatic poet of their time for whom as much can be said. On the other hand, there is scarcely another dramatic poet of their time who had not more than they had of those "raptures" which "were all air and fire," of "that fine madness which rightly should possess a poet's brain." The just and noble eulogy of Drayton, though appropriate above all to the father of English tragedy, is applicable also more or less to the successors of Marlowe, as well as to the master of the "mighty line" himself. To Ford it is less appropriate; to Massinger it is not applicable at all. This is said out of no disrespect or ingratitude to that admirable dramatist, whose graver and lighter studies are alike full of interest and liberal of enjoyment; but the highest touch of imagination, the supreme rapture and 'passion of poetry, he has not felt, and therefore he cannot make us feel.

The story of Giovanni and Annabella was probably based either on fact or tradition; it may perhaps yet be unearthed in some Italian collection of tales after the manner of Cinthio and Bandello (with the tale of incest in Rosset's 'Histoires Tragiques" it has little in common); but in spite of Ford's own assertion I am inclined to conjecture that the story sculptured with such noble skill and care in the scenes of "The Broken