Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/250

 extant works: he is English of the English in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, when suppression is no longer either possible or proper, of all noble and gentle and natural emotion. His passion and his pathos, his loyalty and his chivalry, are always so unobtrusive that their modesty may sometimes run the risk of eclipse before the glory of more splendid poets and more conspicuous patriots: but they are true and trustworthy as Shakespeare's or Milton's or Wordsworth's or Tennyson's or Browning's.

It was many a year before Dick Pike had earned the honour of commemoration by his hand or by any other poet's that Heywood had won his spurs as the champion presenter—if I may be allowed to revive the word—of his humbler and homelier countrymen under the light of a no less noble than simple realism. 'The Fair Maid of the Exchange' is a notable example of what I believe is professionally or theatrically called a one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously unjust and inept remark on Shakespeare's 'King Henry VIII.'—the play in which, according to the principles or tenets of the new criticism which walks or staggers by the new light of a new scholarship, 'the new Shakspere' may or must have been assisted by Flitcher (why not also by Meddletun, Messenger, and a few other novi