This play is a perfect repertory of slang and quaint phrases:  as when the master shoemaker, who has for apprentices two persecuted princes in disguise, and is a very inferior imitation of Dekker’s admirable Simon Eyre, calls his wife Lady d’Oliva—­whatever that may mean, and when she inquires of one of the youngsters, “What’s the matter, boy?  Why are so many chancery bills drawn in thy face?” Habent sua fala libelli:  it is inexplicable that this most curious play should never have been republished, when the volumes of Dodsley’s Old Plays, in their very latest reissue, are encumbered with heaps of such leaden dulness and such bestial filth as no decent scavenger and no rational nightman would have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and smell of any possible reader.

But it is or it should be inconceivable and incredible that the masterpiece of Rowley’s strong and singular genius, a play remarkable for its peculiar power or fusion of strange powers even in the sovereign age of Shakespeare, should have waited upward of three hundred years and should still be waiting for the appearance of a second edition.  The tragedy of “All’s Lost by Lust,” published in the same year with Shakespeare’s great posthumous torso of romantic tragedy, was evidently a favorite child of its author’s:  the terse and elaborate argument subjoined to the careful and exhaustive list of characters may suffice to prove it.  Among these characters we may note that one, “a simple clownish Gentleman,” was “personated by the poet”:  and having noted it, we cannot but long, with a fruitless longing, for such confidences as to the impersonation of the leading characters in other memorable plays of the period.  There is some really good rough humor in the part of this honest clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative reader will doubt that the author’s heart was in the work devoted to the tragic and poetic scenes of a play which shows that the natural bent of his powers was toward tragedy rather than comedy.  Alike as poet and as dramatist, he rises far higher and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his flight is toward the effects of imaginative terror and pity than when it is confined to the effects of humorous or pathetic realism.  In the very first scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and imminent evil provoked by coalition rather than collision of the will of man with the doom of destiny; and the king’s defiance of prophecy and tradition is so admirably rendered or suggested as a sign of brutal and egotistic rather than chivalrous or manful daring as to prepare the way with great dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent scenes of attempted seduction and ultimate violation.  With these the underplot, interesting and original in itself, well conceived and well carried through, is happily and naturally interwoven.  The noble soliloquy of the invading and defeated Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to all true lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of England.  Nothing