'A man careless
Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck
To kill so many as another, dares
Fight with all them that have.'


He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from
a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the
seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a
box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the young cit has been
transformed into an intolerable bully by the fame so acquired) takes
another hundred pounds from the repentant uncle for kicking the youth
back into his native state of peaceful cowardice. With the exception
of some little humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole
play is thoroughly stupid. We look in vain for anything like a
reflection, a sentiment, even a novel image. Its language, like its
morality, is all but on a level with the laboured vulgarities of the
'Relapse' or the 'Provoked Wife,' save that (Shirley being a
confessed copier of the great dramatists of the generation before
him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up
to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their
matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial
smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected
blackguardism of the earlier poets' men.

This, forsooth, is the best comedy which Charles had heard for seven
years, and the plot, which he himself furnished for the occasion,
fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert.