darkest in which it moves and works. In romantic drama or mixed comedy it shines still at times with a lambent grace and temperance of light; but outside the limit of serious thought and feeling it is quenched at once, and leaves but an unsavoury fume behind. Even in those higher latitudes the moral air is not always of the clearest; the sanctity of Giovanni's confessor, for example, has something of the compliant quality of Bianca's virtue; it sits so loosely and easily on him that, fresh from the confession of Annabella's incest, he assists in plighting her hand to Soranzo, and passing off on the bridegroom as immaculate a woman whom he knows to be with child by her brother; and this immediately after that most noble scene in which the terror and splendour of his rebuke has bowed to the very dust before him the fair face and the ruined soul of his penitent. After this we cannot quite agree with Macaulay that Ford has in this play "assigned a highly creditable part to the friar;" but certainly he has the most creditable part there is to play; and as certainly he was designed on the whole for a type of sincere and holy charity. The jarring and startling effect of such moral discords weakens the poet's hold on the reader by the shock they give to his faith and sympathy. Beaumont and Fletcher have sinned heavily in the same way; and the result is that several of their virtuous characters are more really and more justly offensive to the natural sense, more unsavoury to the spiritual taste, than any wantonness of words or extravagance of action can make their representative figures of vice.

In the gallery of Ford's work, as in the gallery of