the dramas of his great contemporaries, made no part of his creed, in which the warmest loyalty is skilfully combined with just and rational ideas of political freedom.

Nor is this the only instance in which the rectitude of his mind is apparent; the writers of his day abound in recommendations of suicide; he is uniform in the reprehension of it, with a single exception, to which, perhaps, he was led by the peculiar turn of his studies. Guilt of every kind is usually left to the punishment of divine justice; even the wretched Malefort excuses himself to his son on his supernatural appearance, because the latter was not marked out by hearen for his mother's avenger ; and the young, the brave, the pious Charalois accounts his death fallen upon him by the will of heaven, because he made himself a judge of heaven.' But the great, the glorious distinction of Massinger, is the uniform respect with which he treats religion and its ministers, in an age when it was found necessary to add regulation to regulation to stop the growth of impiety on the stage. No priests are introduced by him to.set on some quantity of barren spectators' to laugh at their licentious follies, the sacred name is not lightly invoked, nor daringly sported with ; nor is Scripture prefaced by buffoon allusions, lavishly put into the mouths of fools and women.”

“ Our poet,” writes Dr. Ferriar, “ excels more in the description than in the expression of passion; this may be ascribed, in some measure, to his nice attention to the fable: while his scenes are managed with consummate skill, the lighter shades of character and sentiment are lost in the tendency of each part to the catastrophe. The prevailing beauties of his productions are dignity and elegance; their predominant fault is want of passion. The melody, force, and variety of his versification are everywhere remarkable: admitting the validity of all the objections which are made to the employment of blank verse in comedy, Massinger possesses charms sufficient to dissipate them all. When we compare him with the other dramatic writers of his age, we cannot long hesitate where to place him. More natural in his characters and more poetical in his diction than Jonson or Cartwright, more elevated and nervous than Fletcher, the only writers who can be supposed to contest his pre-eminence, Massinger ranks immediately under Shakspere himself.”

In the opinion of Hartley Coleridge, “ Massinger's excellence—a great and beautiful excellence it is was in the expression of virtue, in its probation, its strife, its victory. He could not, like Shakspere, invest the perverted will with the terrors of a magnificent intellect, or bestow the cestus of poetry on simple unconscious loveliness.”

All that is, or perhaps can be, known of George Herbert has been preserved in Izaak Walton's Life of that estimable man. In the subject of his memoir, the simple hearted, nature-loving old angler seems to have found a man whose piety, integrity, and singleness of mind were thoroughly congenial with his own. The theme is dear to him, and he expatiates with a loving earnestness upon the delightful attributes of a character remarkable for its transparent purity, and narrates the chequered incidents of Herbert's brief career in a style as quaint and picturesque as the age in which he lived. The life of the Rector of Bemerton was a living illustration of the truths he preached, and an instructive commentary on his own works. The duties of a Country Parson were not more truly set forth in his “Priest to the Temple,” than they were conscientiously fulfilled in his daily life; and the religious spirit which breathes through every poem of the “ Temple,” was the visible spring of all he wrought and thought in the humble sphere of his pastoral duties. Like the sonnets of Shakspere, these poems embody a history of the writer's own sentiments and feelings, reflecting the transient impulses of the hour, and giving expression to the more permanent and deeply rooted principles which lay at the foundation of his moral being. They are now bright with the sunshine of a hopeful spirit, soaring upwards into the serene and cloudless region of assured belief and lofty contemplation, and now darkened by the shadows with which physical infirmities will sometimes obscure the aspirations of the purest soul.

George, fifth son of Richard Herbert, great grandson of Sir Richard Herbert, of Colebrook, in the county of Monmouth, Knight Banneret, was born at Montgomery Castle on the 3rd of April, 1593. Like most men who have attained to eminence, his mind was moulded by the early training of a good mother, to whose grace and beauty Dr. Donne has given an enduring life. At the age of twelve, Herbert was sent to Westminster School, and three years later, being then a King's Scholar, he was transferred to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1611 he took the degree of Bachelor, and in 1615 that of Master of Arts, and was elected Major Fellow of the College. At this period, as in after life, music was his favourite recreation and unfailing solace. In his own words, “it did relieve his drooping spirits, compose his distracted thoughts, and raised his weary soul so far above earth, that it gave him an earnest of the joys of heaven, before he possessed them. In 1619 he was chosen Orator for the University, an appointment he held for eight years.

While acting in this capacity