course, remains unequalled, as he who runs may read in Dryden's grand translation, but Heywood has done better—to my mind at least—than Shirley was to do in the next generation; though it is to be noted that Shirley has retained more of the magnificent original than did his immediate precursor: but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a burlesque to pass muster even as a blasphemous travestie of the sacred text of Sophocles. In the fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope with no such matchless models or precursors; and it is perhaps the brightest and most interesting of the five. Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing understudy of Thersites: his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of the typical traitress; and though time and space are wanting for the development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its simple fashion: the complicated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.
In 'Love's Mistress; or, The Queen's Masque,' the stage chronicler or historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet:
