that of Dekker's or Middleton's at their best, but usually not far inferior to Heywood's or to theirs. The first of them, 'A New Wonder: A Woman Never Vext,' has received such immortal honour from the loving hand of Lamb that perhaps the one right thing to say of it would be an adaptation of a Catholic formula: 'Agnus locutus est: causa finita est.' The realism is so thorough as to make the interest something more than historical: and historically it is so valuable as well as amusing that a reasonable student may overlook the offensive 'mingle-mangle' of prose and verse which cannot but painfully affect the nerves of all not congenitally insensitive readers, as it surely must have ground and grated on the ears of an audience accustomed to enjoy the prose as well as the verse of Shakespeare and his kind. No graver offence can be committed or conceived by a writer with any claim to any but contemptuous remembrance than this debasement of the currency of verse.
The character of Robert Foster is so noble and attractive in its selfless and manful simplicity that it gives us and leaves with us a more cordial sense of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator than we could feel if this gallant and homely figure were withdrawn from the stage of his invention. The female Polycrates who suffers under the curse of inevitable and intolerable good fortune
