Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/246

 of no less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche—'La Reine d'Espagne.'

Little favour has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors to 'The Royal King and the Loyal Subject': and the author himself, in committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition and versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need not shrink from comparison with Fletcher's more elaborate, rhetorical, elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of 'The Loyal Subject'; that the somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood's hero is not more slavish or foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher's; and that even if we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood. The humour is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality and versatility is as