I should say that his
call was rather toward tragedy than toward comedy; that his mastery of
severe and serious emotion was more genuine and more natural than his
command of satirical or grotesque realism. The tragedy in which he has
grappled with the subject afterward so differently handled in the first
and greatest of Landor's tragedies is to me of far more interest and
value than such comedies as that which kindled the enthusiasm of a loyal
Londoner in the civic sympathies of Lamb. Disfigured as it is toward the
close by indulgence in mere horror and brutality after the fashion of
Andronicus or Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and pathos in its
best scenes than a reader of his comedies would have expected. But in
the underplot of "A Fair Quarrel" Rowley's besetting faults of
coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and
obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at
such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet
of finer if not of sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and
inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better
parts of "The Old Law.
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