are sometimes though not generally for the better.
Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared that 'posterity is bound to take care' (an obligation, I fear, of a kind which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) 'that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty' as that which induced Heywood to set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in the rascally interest of those 'harlotry players' who thought it, forsooth, 'against their peculiar profit to have them come in print.' But I am not sure that it was altogether a noble or at all a rational modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt: 'It never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read.' For, eight years after this well-known passage was in print, when publishing a 'Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable passages of this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles,' he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, 'an apologie of the Author' for slurring or skipping the record of her life and times in a curious passage which curiously omits as unworthy of mention his dramatic work on the subject, while complacently enumerating his certainly less valuable and memorable other tributes to the great
