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 not unworthily heralded or announced in such verses as these:

This was my son, Born with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast, Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love; His youth my pride; his honour all my wishes; So dear, that little less he was than life.

The subsequent adventures of Hercules and the Argonauts are presented with the same quiet straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious that the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly as it is humorously and dramatically presented. The rivalry of Omphale and Deianeira for their hero's erratic affection affords a lively and happy mainspring—not suggested by Caxton—for the tragic action and passion of the closing scenes.

At the opening of 'The Iron Age,' nineteen years later in date of publication, we find ourselves at last arrived in a province of dramatic poetry where something of consecutive and coherent action is apparently the aim if not always the achievement of the writer. These ten acts do