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 his intimate and familiar science of wretchedness, his great and gentle spirit of compassion for the poor and suffering with whom his own lot in life was so often cast, in prison and out. The two chief soliloquies of Mother Sawyer, her first and last invocations of the familiar, are noble samples of his passionate dramatic power; their style has a fiery impulse and rapidity quite unlike the usual manner of his colleague. Gifford was probably right in assigning to Ford the whole of the first act; there is no more admirable exposition of a play on the English stage; the perfect skill and the straightforward power with which the plan of the story is opened and the interest of the reader fixed are made the more evident by the direct simplicity of method and means used. Ford, therefore, must have the credit of first bringing forward two of the main characters in the domestic tragedy which makes up the better part of this composite play; and the introduction of Frank and Winnifrede gives ominous and instant promise of the terror and pathos of their after story. The part of Susan is one of Decker's most beautiful and delicate studies; in three short scenes he has given an image so perfect in its simple sweetness as hardly to be overmatched outside the gallery of Shakespeare's women. The tender freshness of his pathos, its plain frank qualities of grace and strength, never showed themselves with purer or more powerful effect than here; the after scene where Frank's guilt is discovered has the same force and vivid beauty. The interview of Frank with the disguised Winnifrede in this scene may be compared by the student of dramatic style with the parting of the same characters at the close; the one has all the