The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of
Heywood's work which with all their great and real merit have least in
them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of
his genius: those qualities of which when we think of him we think
first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most
naturally associate with his name. As a historical or mythological
playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from
English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the
sweet-tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of
Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something
of his humor: but if this were all we had of him we should know
comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find
most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is
more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories
or his legendary complications and variations on the antique. The famous
and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be
forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading "The Four
Prentices of London.
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