'Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.--Now, what you please;
What death?'


And so the play ends, as does 'Vittoria Corrombona,' with half a
dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles;
putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book
of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge,' in which, with all due
pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for
abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish
histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or
two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the
playwrights of the day.

The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley,
one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He
appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the
Queen's favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was 'one of
such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate
poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.'

We must entreat the reader's attention while we examine Shirley's