dramatist would have been an intrusion, to which I have not felt tempted. No one, I hope, will refuse me the meed of praise for that abstinence, merely because the virtue was an easy one. For men have been known, ere now, to labour to go wrong, and have fatigued themselves in a serious effort to be superfluous. The book remains merely and sheerly Charles Lamb's book; Charles Lamb being, indeed, here the "Editor," whose work is only in some immaterial respects seen better through the press by another hand. From what I have said the Reader will infer, I hope, that the titular Editor has had very little to do with the labour of producing these two volumes in their present form, and is therefore entitled to no part of the praise. He has, indeed, a kind of responsibility, as having decided the general question of what should be done, and, to some extent, how it should be gone about. And from time to time the Editorial intelligence-that is to say, the Editorial authority and aptitude for dogmatism-has been invoked, to deal with a doubt, or a dilemma. I believe I have managed once to make sense where all my predecessors have made nonsense; but that could not help happening, once at least. These invocations, however, have been rare, and I am sure the work has prospered by their rarity. And thus is fulfilled that which was written in my General Preface, to the prophetic last words of which the Reader is now requested to turn.

W. M.

IX.

xxxix

d

PREFACE

MORE than a third part of the following specimens are from plays which are to be found only in the British Museum and in some scarce private libraries. The rest are from Dodsley's and Hawkins's collections, and the works of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger.

I have chosen wherever I could to give entire scenes, and in some instances successive scenes, rather than to string together single passages and detached beauties, which I have always found wearisome in the reading in selections of this nature.

To every extract is prefixed an explanatory head, sufficient to make it intelligible with the help of some trifling omissions. Where a line or more was obscure, as having reference to something that had gone before, which would have asked more time to explain than its consequence in the scene seemed to deserve, I have had no hesitation in leaving the line or passage out. Sometimes where I have met with a superfluous character, which seemed to burthen without throwing any light upon the scene, I have ventured to dismiss it altogether. I have expunged, without ceremony, all that which the writers had better never have written, that forms the objection so often repeated to the promiscuous reading of Fletcher, Massinger, and some others.

The kind of extracts which I have sought after have been, not so much passages of wit and humour, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I have made choice of have been, with few exceptions, those which treat of human life and manners, rather than masques, and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals, Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amarillis. My leading design has been, to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors. To show in what manner they felt, when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations, in the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their griefs were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind.

Another object which I had in making these selections was, to bring together the most admired scenes in Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age who are entitled to be considered after Shakspeare, and to exhibit them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others. To show what we have slighted, while beyond all proportion we have cried up one or two favourite names.

The specimens are not accompanied with anything in the shape of biographical notices.1 I had nothing

1 The few notes which are interspersed will be found to be chiefly critical.

of consequence to add to the slight sketches in Dodsley and the Biographia Dramatica, and I was unwilling to swell the volume with mere transcription. The reader will not fail to observe, from the frequent instances of two or more persons joining in the composition of the same play (the noble practice of those times), that of most of the writers contained in these selections it may be strictly said, that they were contemporaries. The whole period, from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the close of the reign of Charles I., comprises a space of little more than half a century, within which time nearly all that we have of excellence in serious dramatic composition was produced, if we except the Samson Agonistes of Milton.

CHARLES LAMB.

1808.