The innocent, out of particular spleen;
If any in this reverend assembly,
Nay, even yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Cæsar, feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past,
Or things intended,—’T IS NOT IN US TO HELP IT.
I have said, my lord: and now, as you find cause,
Or censure us, or free us with applause.”
We know nothing else of Massinger’s personal history beyond what has been told, except that the parish register of St. Saviour’s contains this entry: “March 20, 1639–40, buried Philip Massinger, a stranger.” A pathos has been felt by some in the words “a stranger,” as if they implied poverty and desertion. But they merely meant that Massinger did not belong to that parish. John Aubrey is spoken of in the same way in the register of St. Mary Magdalen at Oxford, and for the same reason.
Massinger wrote thirty-seven plays, of which only eighteen have come down to us. The name of one of these non-extant plays, “The Noble Choice,” gives a keen pang to a lover of the poet, for it seems to indicate a subject peculiarly fitted to bring out his best qualities as a dramatist. Four of the lost plays were used to kindle fires by that servant of Mr. Warburton who made such tragic havoc in our earlier dramatic literature, a vulgar Omar without the pious motive of the Commander of the Faithful, if, as is very doubtful, he did indeed order the burning of the Alexandrian Library.