successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest
approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed
metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make
harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the
meaning should be understood;--when the meaning is once seen, then the
harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who
followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the
sense.

3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite
characters, as in Bertoldo in the Maid of Honour, who is a swaggerer,
talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to
gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose.

4. Shakspeare's Ague-cheek, Osric, &c. are displayed through others, in
the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some
office in which they are employed; but Massinger's 'Sylli' come forward
to declare themselves fools 'ad arbitrium auctoris,' and so the diction
always needs the 'subintelligitur' ('the man looks as if he thought so
and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of
the man himself:--


'Sylli.' You may, madam,
Perhaps, believe that I in this use art
To make you dote upon me, by exposing
My more than most rare features to your view;
But I, as I have ever done, deal simply,
A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted
In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady,