Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/193

 comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in his excellent critical introduction. 'The Inner-Temple Masque,' less elaborate than 'The World Tost at Tennis,' shows no lack of homely humour and invention: and in the others there is as much waste of fine flowing verse and facile fancy as ever excited the rational regret of a modern reader at the reckless profusion of literary power which the great poets of the time were content to lavish on the decoration or exposition of an ephemeral pageant. Of Middleton's other minor works, apocryphal or genuine, I will only say that his authorship of 'Microcynicon'—a dull and crabbed imitation of Marston's worst work as a satirist—seems to me utterly incredible. A lucid and melodious fluency of style is the mark of all his metrical writing; and this stupid piece of obscure and clumsy jargon could have been the work of no man endowed with more faculty of expression than informs or modulates the whine of an average pig. Nor is it rationally conceivable that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some reams of paper with what he was pleased to consider or to call a paraphrase of the 'Wisdom of Solomon' can have had anything but a poet's name in common with a poet. This name is not like that of the great writer whose name is attached to 'The Transformed Metamorphosis': there can hardly have