exceedingly rare. There is an air of old-fashionedness about the diction
and the metre that would lead us to suppose the play was written several
years before the date of publication. The wearisome practice, in which
the characters so freely indulge, of speaking in the third person is
very characteristic of the earlier dramatists, notably of Greene. Yet it
is clear, from more than one passage, that the author was acquainted
with Shakespeare's historical plays. Dick Bowyer's puns on the
sentinels' names (ii. 1) were certainly suggested by Falstaff's
pleasantries with the recruits in _Henry IV_., Part II. Winstanley
absurdly ascribes the piece to William Wager, who flourished (?) when
Shakespeare was a child. If I were obliged to make a guess at the
authorship, I would name Chettle or Munday, or both. It is not
altogether improbable that the _Tryall of Chevalry_ may be the play by
Chettle and Wentworth Smith, entitled _Love Parts Friendship_, acted in
1602[108]. Bourbon and Rodorick are just such a pair of villains as
young Playnsey and Sir Robert Westford in Chettle and Day's _Blind
Beggar_. The low comedy in both pieces might well have come from the
same hand, though Dick Bowyer is certainly more amusing than the
roystering companions in the _Blind Beggar_.

I make no claim for high excellence on behalf of this unknown
playwright. The writing is at times thin and feeble, and the
versification is somewhat monotonous. But with all its faults, the
language is dramatic. The writer was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and
something of Shakespeare's spirit breathes through the pages of this
forgotten play. Take such a speech as the following, from the second
scene of the opening act:--

Must I be spokesman? _Pembrooke_ plead for love?
Whose tounge tuned to the Instruments of war