successively happy in the family of the Herberts, who had long possessed it, and with it a plentiful estate, and hearts as liberal to their poor neighbours; a family that hath been blessed with remarkable wisdom, and a willingness to serve their country, and, indeed, to do good to all mankind,-for which they were eminent. But, alas! this family did in the late Rebellion suffer extremely in their estates, and the heirs of that castle saw it laid level with that earth which was too good to cover those wretches that were the cause of it."

What a gentleman was Izaak, though he commenced business in a shop wherein two men had not room to turn themselves! He chooses to forget entirely that the meanest, if not the worst, of those "wretches whom the earth was too good to cover," the very man who was appointed to convey to his royal benefactor that insolent demand which went to strip him of all his prerogative, and so far provoked King Charles out of his usually guarded speech, that he answered him with, "No, Phil,BY GOD,-not for an hour," and who actually renounced his rank to sit in a kingless Parliament, was the bead of the family of Pembroke. This is true gentility.

Of the childhood and boyhood of Massinger no record remains. It has been said, indeed, that he was brought up in the family of his father's patron; but if so, how comes it that in 1624, when his "Bondman" was first printed, he “had never arrived at the happiness to be made known" to Philip of Montgomery? He must needs have known him as a boy, and was not likely to have forgotten the circumstance in his dedication. I do not, however, recollect where Philip spent his tender years. He certainly was a courtier in his teens. Could it indeed be proved that the child Massinger wandered in the marble halls and pictured galleries of Wilton, that princely who was governor of Portsmouth and chancellor of Oxford; an honour he seems to have well deserved, since honest Antony Wood says of him, "that he was not only a great patronizer of learned and ingenious men, but was himself learned, and endowed to admiration with a poetical geny, as by those amorous and poetical airs and poems of his composition doth evidently appear, some of which had musical notes set to them by Henry Lawes and Nich. Lancare." It is not often that Antony smiles upon anything "amorous and poetical;" he seems to have had as indifferent an opinion of poetry as Locke or Jeremy Bentham: but perhaps he thought it, like hunting or hawking, a gentlemanly recreation, in which a nobleman might be allowed to indulge. At the period when Antony's opinions were fashioned, not only poetry, but philology in general, was considered as little better than a showy accomplishment, a fringe of learning, that might adorn, but could not clothe or arm the inner man-such at least was the judgment of the universities; at present the tendency is too much the other way. But Pembroke had other panegyrists than the old Jacobite antiquarian of Merton; half Lincoln fens were employed in his praise, and Mr. Campbell supposes that he was the mysterious subject of Shakspeare's sonnets, an hypothesis to which I can by no means accede. No doubt, however, he was a patron of the drama, and probably of its greatest author, for he was joined with his brother Philip in the dedication to the folio of 1623. As he is nowise connected with the known history of Massinger, we need say no more of him than that he died in 1630, leaving no issue, although, upon Mr. Campbell's supposition, he had been passionately exhorted not to

-bear his beauties to the grave And leave the world no copy."

He was succeeded by his brother Philip, already created Earl of Montgomery, from whom the titles have descended together to the present time. I cannot conclude this overgrown note without suggesting the possibility that among the family papers of the Herberts something might be discovered to throw light on the carly history of Massinger, and to account for his apparent alienation from a house of which he was in some sort, a member. But perhaps the search has already been made in vain.

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seat of old magnificence, where Sir Philip Sidney composed his Arcadia; that his young eyes gazed upon those panels whereon the story of Mopsa and Dorcas, and Musidorus and Philoclea, were limned in antique tracery; that he was dandled in his babyhood by the fair Countess of the Arcadia, and shared the parting kiss of Sir Philip when he set forth for those wars from which he was never to return,—with what accumulated interest should we read his dramas, several of which display an intimacy with the details of noble housekeeping, not likely to have been acquired in the latter periods of the poet's existence! Is it not possible that Sir Philip may have been his godfather, and given him his name? The conjecture is in strict accordance with the manners of that age, and almost derives a plausibility from the sequel of Massinger's fortunes. It is a common trick of Fate to flatter the infancy of those whose manhood is written in her black book.

At thy birth, dear boy!

Nature and Fortune joined to make thee great;
Of Nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose: but Fortune, oh!
She is corrupted, changed, and won from thee!

KING JOHN, Act iii. Scene 1.

Many a dawn of golden beauty harbingers a day of troubled dimness: many a one has smiled in the cradle on the fair, the great, the good, and the wise, whose death-bed was without a comfort or a comforter.

But enough of these speculations. Juvenile biography was little in vogue in the days of Elizabeth and James, (though the sayings and doings of some few distinguished children, as Sir Philip Sidney, and Henry Prince of Wales, have been fondly recorded.) It is not, therefore, to be wondered, that the boyish days of Massinger present a blank, upon which it were easy to write a multitude of possibilities. For instance, we know that there was a company of actors, calling themselves the Earl of Pembroke's players. We know that theatrical companies were often itinerant, and used to be entertained and employed at the country mansions of the nobility; that the female parts always, and sometimes the whole plays, were performed by boys. It is possible enough that Massinger may have seen the earl's players in his boyhood; it is possible that he may have worn petticoats among them, as Achilles did at Scyros, and so may have acquired an early hankering after the stage. Both biographies and histories of formidable length have been constructed out of such possibilities, and put forth with all the confidence of eye-witness, sometimes to the subversion of all recorded testimony. But I dare not be thus dogmatically hypothetical. Facts are not to be deduced from premises, like conclusions in mood and figure.

Somewhere or other Massinger obtained a classical education. That his works evince. He was probably acquainted with the French and Italian, perhaps with the Spanish language, then a point of fashion: but these might be the acquisitions of his riper years. He seems to have read some of the Fathers, and to have dipped into theology and moral philosophy. But his learning is no way scholastic or profound: it is that of a reader, rather than of a student. His classical allusions are frequent, but not like those of Ben Jonson, recondite, nor like those of Shakspeare and of Milton,

amalgamated and consubstantiated with his native thought. They float, like drops of oil on water, on the surface of his style, and have too much the air of quotations. What erudition he possessed he was not shy of displaying; no more was Shakspeare: Jonson was not a whit more of a pedant than his contemporaries; he showed more reading, because he had more to show.

Massinger, whoever was his schoolmaster, entered a commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, May 14th, 1602. I give this date on the authority of Mr. Gifford, who says that he had the memorandum of his matriculation before him, wherein he is styled the son of a gentleman: "Philip Massinger Sarisburiensis, Generosi filius." Yet Antony Wood places his entrance in 1601. Davies fails in his attempt to account for the discrepancy, by the change of Style. But Antony was not writing on oath, and was not likely to take the pains of accurate reference about a man who was only a poet,— a race for whom he had as little respect as for womankind. He differs from Langbaine on a point of rather more importance. Langbaine believes that he was supported by his father, and that he stuck closely to his studies. Wood asserts that his exhibition was from the Earl of Pembroke, and "that he gave his mind more to poetry and romance for about four years or more, than to logic and philosophy, which he ought to have done, as he was patronised to that end." Undoubtedly he ought, if he could. It would have been better for him if he had. He might have obtained a fellowship, and become, like Antony, a great antiquarian, though I think it more likely that he would have turned out a passionate puritan divine. But whatever were the cause, he quitted the university abruptly, and without a degree; whether in consequence of his father's death, (the date of which is uncertain,) or of the failure of remittances from other quarters, or, which is most probable, from impatience of academic restraint, (the more irksome, as at the time of his entrance, he considerably exceeded the average years of an undergraduate of that time, when undergraduates were subject to a discipline only calculated for the lowest form,) or an eagerness to follow the bent of his genius, and the steps of Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, no doubt, in his esteem, the greatest and happiest of men. We cannot conceive, with Davies, that his lack of logic made the terrors of an examination too awful for his nerves. He has never been accused of any criminal irregularity. He, at least, was not a deer-stealer, nor a libeller of the landed aristocracy. Wood only charges him with his addiction to poetry and romance. But it is very probable his father's death bereft him of the heart and hope of his academical studies; for it does not appear that he had brother or sister to rejoice in his success, or reprove his indiscretion. If any conception of his character may be formed from his plays, he had a strong and independent spirit, ill calculated to brook or retain the favour or surveillance of patronizing superiors. There is too much likelihood that he gave some offence to the Herberts, or he would hardly have been overlooked by so generous a friend of genius as earl William. Young men, smit with the passion of liberty, too often seek it where it is never to be found, in a life without regular profession or definite controul.

Gifford conjectures that Massinger had, "during his residence in the university, exchanged the religion of his father for one at that time the object of terror, persecution, and

hatred;" and concludes, from the "Virgin Martyr, the Renegado, the Maid of Honour, and from casual intimations scattered over his remaining dramas," that he had attached himself to the church of Rome. This is very possible, but there is not even circumstantial evidence of the fact. His dramas, like those of his contemporaries in general, were mostly founded on French or Italian novels, or old legends, which it would have been no easy matter to convert to Protestantism, without converting them to irony and satire. His characters are Catholics of the old church, and he makes them speak as such; they are Catholics, superstitious Catholics it may be, but neither Protestants nor Papists. He never brings the old and reformed churches into opposition, as had frequently been done upon the stage, in spite of repeated orders to the contrary. A writer, who lays his scene in a Mahometan country, and makes his characters Mahometans, must be, pro tempore and dramatically, a Mahometan himself. He must speak of Mahomet as a true prophet, acknowledge the divine authenticity of the Koran, and use no ill language of the Houris; yet he may do all this without bringing any just suspicion upon his Christianity, so long as he does not bring Christian and Moslem together, for the purpose of throwing discredit on the former, or setting off the latter to advantage, as Voltaire has done in his "Zaïre." Now Massinger has given no such proof of his preferring the proscribed to the established church. He never, that I can discover, alludes specifically to the Church of England at all. At any rate, his religious tendencies, whatever they might be, could have little to do with his quitting Oxford, a university always more Catholic than Protestant, attached to every relic of antique formality, as a faithful widow to the effigies of the husband of her youth, or a too confiding damsel to the tokens of a lover whom she would never have forsaken, if he had not forsaken her. Nothing but an overt act of Popery (not likely to have been unknown or unmentioned by Antony Wood) would have endangered Massinger on the banks of Isis. There is nothing in his known works from which we can even conjecture the creed of his conviction, what he did or did not believe. If there ever were any such data, the "Master of the Revels" has intercepted them on their way to posterity. It is impossible to say in what measure he partook of the errors and superstitions which had encrusted Christianity in the lazy lapse of ages, and which were rejected by the Divines who undertook to restore the Primitive Church. But if it be duly considered, that in his days, the visible Church of England was an untrimmed vessel, lurching now towards Rome, and now towards Geneva, it is no wonder if many of the young, the impassioned, the imaginative, inclined towards that form of faith and of worship, which wore at least the semblance of venerable seniority, gave ample room for the fancy and the affections, was inextricably intertwined with the whole tissue of chivalry and romance, hallowed alike the gorgeous ceremony, the austere fast, and the periodic day of rustic merriment-and "was all things to all men," holding out the honours of apotheosis to the ascetic, and offering an easy absolution to the voluptuous. Contrast with this the saturnine rigour of Ultra-protestantism, its utter antipathy, not only to the acted drama, but to all the poetry of life, manners, and nature; consider the indefatigable and undaunted industry of the propagandists of Romanism, then recommended by the prestige of peril, who so

well know how much of their system it may be expedient to bring into relief, and what should be discreetly left in shadow, apprised, as by an instinct, whom, and how, and when, to attack; and the most zealous Protestant will rather be thankful that all the young genius of Britain was not enlisted under the banner of the Cross Keys, than angry at such as clung to the " decaying sanctities" of olden time*.

* Let us examine how far these three plays—“The Virgin Martyr," "The Renegado," and "The Maid of Honour," exhibit “innumerable proofs" that Massinger was a Roman Catholic.

The "Virgin Martyr" is the joint work of Massinger and Decker; and though their several shares in the composition may be discerned with proximate probability, it is not known which of them selected the story, or whether either of them chose it at all. It may be the rifacciamento of an older play. It may be borrowed from the work of some foreign dramatist, or founded on one of the so called mysteries. I am not well enough read in martyrology to point out the particular legend which suggested the plot; but the tale is made up in great measure of the common-places of the monastic romance, which were as often repeated, as ingeniously varied, and as indispensable, as those of the modern novel. The outline may be sketched as follows :-" In the bloody times of Dioclesian, there lived at Cæsarea a noble virgin named Dorothea, fair and rich, and much beloved of Antoninus, the Governor's son of Cæsarea, who, for her sake, rejected the proffered love of Artemia, the Emperor's daughter. But because Dorothea was a Christian, and had devoted her virginity to Heaven, and Antoninus was an idolater, she would not be wooed of him, or other earthly suitor. And she had a page, named Angelo, whom she found at the temple-gate, in likeness of a 'sweet-faced, godly, beggar-boy,' asking an alms, but in truth he was an angel, come to guard her from all evil and temptation, from fear and from pleasure, for the exceeding favour he had to her holiness and her virginity. Now there was in Caesarea a certain Theophilus, a cruel persecutor of the Christians, who had for his servant a fiend named Harpax, by whose means he was informed of many things that of himself he could not have known, and particularly of the love that young Antoninus bore to Dorothea, whereof he also did inform the Princess Artemia; so, by the contrivance of Dorothea's wicked servants, Theophilus, with Sapritius the Governor, and the Princess, were brought to overlook where Antoninus was wooing Dorothea, promising her riches and worldly glory, and liberty to worship after her own fashion, if she would consent to be his wife-all which she set at nought for the love of Him to whom she was betrothed in Heaven. Whereat the Princess, seeing that she was lightly esteemed of him to whom she had demeaned herself to solicit his affection, was exceeding wroth, and would bave slain both Antoninus and Dorothea, but that she loved him, and would not give to her the martyrdom which she longed for. Howbeit, Dorothea was bereft of all her goods, and shut up in prison; and Antoninus given in charge to his father the Governor.

“But when it was heard that the young man had fallen sick, and would not be comforted, the Princess, who was an Emperor's daughter, and of a high and noble spirit, was moved with compassion; and subduing her own desires, gave consent that if Dorothea would return and worship the gods of her fathers, she should be wedded unto Antoninus. Now, Theophilus had two daughters that had heretofore been Christians, but, because they loved the world, and feared their father, and the terror of his torments, had turned back to their idols. These young damsels, Calista and Christeta, were set on by their father to persuade Dorothea to renounce her faith and become even as they were. But Dorothea wrestled mightily, and overcame-having Angelo, her good augel, ever at her side, so that Calista and Christeta again forswore the gods of the heathen; and when the time came that they should bring forth Dorothea to bow before the image of Jupiter, they cast the image on the ground and spat upon it. Whereupon Theophilus, at the instigation of Harpax, slew them, and sent back Dorothea to be tortured. All this while Antoninus continued sick and beside himself, so that his father, hearing him still call out on Dorothea, not being willing that he should perish, sent for Dorothea, that the young man might have his will on her. But when the young man saw her, and heard her words how good they were, and perceived how excellent a thing is virgin chastity, his heart was changed, and he would not touch her. So Sapritius, in his rage, would have given her up to a slave; but the slave being a Briton, would do no such vile deed. Then the Governor would have sent for ten slaves, but he was smitten down by an unseen hand, and one side of his face blasted as with lightning; whereat he was the more hardened; and he and Theophilus called Dorothea witch, and hired her wicked servants to torture her; but their arms were withered, so that they could not. Wherefore, because it was thought they did their work slightly, they were sent unto the death, and Dorothea was doomed to be beheaded.