Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/249

 means 'an entire hand.' The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark: though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect. Dick Pike is a better study of the bluff and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in 'The Trial of Chivalry': and the same chivalrous sympathy with the chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which delights us in 'A Challenge for Beauty' pervades and vivifies this long-lost and long-forgotten play. The partial sacrifice of ethical propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences of the stage is rather more startling than usual: a fratricidal ravisher and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being happy though married. The hand of Heywood is more recognisable in the presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his others, and in the noble answer of the criminal's brother to their father's very natural question: 'Why dost thou take his part so?'

Because no drop of honour falls from him But I bleed with it.

This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as traceable in the earlier as in the later of Heywood's