give some degree of individuality to the figure, but still with a tenderness of touch which would have been much to the credit of the dramatist's skill had he been writing in the Tudor age. The play is, however, founded on Bacon's Life, of which the text is used by Ford with admirable discretion. The minor characters of the honest old Huntley, whom the Scottish king obliges to bestow his daughter's hand upon Warbeck, and of her lover the faithful "Dalyell," are most effectively drawn; even "the men of judgment," the adventurers who surround the chief adventurer, are spirited sketches, and the Irishman among them has actually some humour; while the style of the play is, as befits a "Chronicle History," so clear and straightforward as to make it easy as well as interesting to read.
The Witch of Edmonton was attributed by its publisher to William Rowley, Dekker, Ford, "&c.," but the body of the play has been generally held to be ascribable to Ford and Dekker only. Mr Swinburne agrees with Gifford in thinking Ford the author of the whole of the first act; and he is most assuredly right in considering that "there is no more admirable exposition of a play on the English stage." Supposing Dekker to be chiefly responsible for the scenes dealing with the unfortunate old woman whom persecution as a witch actually drives to become one, and Ford for the domestic tragedy of the bigamist murderer, it cannot be denied that both divisions of the subject are effectively treated, while the more important part of the task fell to the share of Ford. Yet it may be doubted whether any such division can be safely assumed; and it may suffice to repeat that no domestic tragedy has ever taught with more effective simplicity and thrilling truthfulness the homely double lesson of the folly of selfishness and the mad rashness of crime. To us such plays as this are singularly interesting, both as pictures of the manners of the age which they depict without the effort more or less perceptible in comedy, and as illustrations of a species of the modern drama which, in its best examples, is perhaps of all the least liable to essential change.
With Dekker Ford also wrote the mask of The Sun's Darling; or, as seems most probable, they founded this production upon Phaeton, an earlier mask, of which Dekker had been sole author. Gifford holds that Dekker's hand is perpetually traceable in the first three acts of The Sun's Darling, and through the whole of its comic part, but that the last two acts are mainly Ford's. If so, he is the author of the rather forced occasional tribute on the accession of King Charles I., of which the last act largely consists. This mask, which furnished abundant opportunities for the decorators, musicians, and dancers, in showing forth how the seasons and their delights are successively exhausted by a "wanton darling," Ray-bright the grandchild of the Sun, is said to have been very popular. It is at the same time commonplace enough in conception; but there is much that is charming in the descriptions, Jonson and Lyly being respectively laid under contribution in the course of the dialogue, and in one of the incidental lyrics.
Ford holds a position of his own among our dramatists of the second order. This he owes not to his skill as a constructor of plots, which he at times prepares better than he executes them, thus verifying the observation that the supreme skill of the dramatist lies, not in devising or finding the chief situation of his play, but in the harmonious building-up of the action and development of the characters towards it. Nor does he owe it even to the beauty of his versification, the fluency and strength of which are incontestable, notwithstanding a certain obscurity of style. His peculiar power lies in the intensity of his passion, in particular scenes and passages where the character, the author, and the reader are alike lost in the situation and in the sentiment evoked by it; and this gift is a supreme dramatic gift. But his plays—with the exception of The Witch of Edmonton, in which he doubtless had a prominent share—too often disturb the mind like a bad dream which ends as an unsolved dissonance; and this defect is a supreme dramatic defect. It is not the rigid or the stolid who have the most reason to complain of the insufficiency of tragic poetry such as Ford's; nor is it that morality only which, as Ithocles says in The Broken Heart, "is formed of books and school-traditions," which has a right to protest against the final effect of the most powerful creations of his genius. There is a morality which both
"Keeps the soul in tune,
At whose sweet music all our actions dance,"
and is able to physic
"The sickness of a mind
Broken with griefs."
Of that morality—or of that deference to the binding power within man and the ruling power above him—tragedy is the truest expounder, even when it illustrates by contrasts; but the tragic poet who merely places the problem before us, and bids us stand aghast with him at its cruelty, is not to be reckoned among the great masters of a divine art.
The best edition of Ford is that by Gifford, with notes and introduction, revised with additions to both text and notes by the late Mr Dyce (3 vols. 1869). Mr Swinburne's "Essay on Ford," to which reference has been made in this article, is reprinted among his Essays and Studies (1875). (a. w. w.)
FORD, RICHARD (1796-1858), author of one of the earliest and best of travellers' Handbooks, was the eldest son of Sir Richard Ford, who in 1789 was member of parliament for East Grinstead, and for many years afterwards chief police magistrate of London. His mother was the daughter and heiress of Benjamin Booth, who was a distinguished connoisseur in art, and from whom his grandson seemed to have inherited the artistic skill and taste which he developed to so high a pitch of excellence in his writings, his sketches, and his collections from Continental countries, particularly Spain. He was educated at Winchester, graduated at Trinity College, Oxford, and was called to the bar in Lincoln's Inn. Ford, however, never practised the profession of a lawyer, and in 1830 he landed for the first time in Spain, where he travelled for three years, spending much of his time in the Alhambra, and at Seville. On his return to England in 1833, he settled in Devonshire at Heavitree, near Exeter, where, writes his friend, the late Sir William Stirling Maxwell, "he built himself a charming residence, and surrounded it with gardens and terraces, which he adorned with graceful Moorish buildings, and planted with pines and cypresses from historic groves by the Xenil and Guadalquiver." From 1837 to 1857 he contributed to the Quarterly Review, his first contribution to that periodical being a paper on the apparently uninviting subject of Devonshire cob walls, and his last a review of Tom Brown's School Days. His first work was the pamphlet, An Historical Inquiry into the Unchangeable Character of a War in Spain (Murray, 1837), in reply to one called the Policy of England towards Spain, and issued under the patronage of Lord Palmerston. He spent the winter of 1839-40 in Italy, where he added largely to his collection of majolica; and soon after his return he began, at Mr Murray's invitation, to write his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, the literary work with which his name is chiefly associated. In consequence of the failure of his health, he was obliged to resign his seat on a royal commission that had been appointed, in the winter of 1856-7, to report on the best site for the National Gallery, and he died on the 31st August 1858.
FORD, Thomas, an English musician, of whose life little more is known than that he was attached to the court of Prince Henry, son of James I. His works also are few, but they are sufficient to show the high stage of efficiency and musical knowledge which the English school had attained at the beginning of the 17th century. They consist of canons and other concerted pieces of vocal music, mostly with lute accompaniment. The chief collection of his works is entitled Musike of Sundrie Kinds set forth in Two Books, &c., 1607, and the histories of music by Burney and Hawkins give specimens of his art. Together with Dowland, immortalized in one of Shakespeare's sonnets, Ford is the chief representative of the school which preceded Henry Lawes, the great master of declamatory music, who, according to Milton,
"First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent."
In this art, however, Ford is by no means deficient, his
