His real interest and his real
sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and
manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and
awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch
of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued
simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever
enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd
mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which
is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of
the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as
a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with
the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the
two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in
"Parasitaster" and "The Dutch Courtesan," a general defect in his
unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter
violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the
work of a professional and practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly
described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and slovenly are not the
same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence.
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