MIDDLETON, Conyers (1683-1750), the earliest and most eminent example of the spirit of theological rationalism in the English Church of the 18th century, was the son of the rector of Hinderwell near Whitby, and was born at Richmond in Yorkshire, on December 27 (or, according to another account, on August 3), 1683. He graduated at Cambridge, took orders, and in 1706 obtained a fellowship, which he soon resigned upon contracting an advantageous marriage. In 1717 a dispute with Bentley, upon an extortionate demand of the latter on occasion of Middleton’s being created D.D., involved him in an acrimonious controversy, which called forth several pamphlets from his pen full of powerful invective, and among them his first considerable literary performances, the Remarks and Further Remarks on Bentley’s Proposals for a Few Edition of the Greek Testament (1721). “You have laid Bentley flat upon his back,” wrote Colbatch. “I scorn to read what the rascal has written,” wrote Bentley,—who, however, only resorted to this affected disdain after a fruitless attempt to fix the authorship upon Colbatch, but who might justly have commented upon the impropriety of Middleton’s endeavour to visit his grievances upon the text of the New Testament. Private resentment and uncurbed personality were throughout his life too frequently the motive and the note of Middleton’s controversial publications. In 1723 he was involved in a lawsuit by personalities against Bentley, which had found their way into his otherwise judicious tract on library administration, written on occasion of his appointment to the honourable office of university librarian. In 1726 he gave great offence to the medical profession by a dissertation contending that the healing art among the ancients was only exercised by slaves or freedmen. Between the dates of these publications he visited Italy, and made those observations on the pagan pedigree of Italian superstitions which he subsequently embodied in his Letter from Rome (1729). Tlιis cogent tract, while establishing the author’s main proposition with abundant learning and wit, gave at the same time the first clear indication of the anti-supernatural-istic bias of his intellect, and probably contributed to prepare the storm which broke out against him on his next publication (1731). In his remonstrance with Waterland on occasion of the latter’s reply to Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, Middleton takes a line which in his day could hardly fail to expose him to the reproach of infidelity. He gives up the literal truth of the primeval Mosaic narratives; and, in professing to indicate a short and easy method of confuting Tindal, lays principal stress on the indispensableness of Christianity as a mainstay of social order. This was to resign nearly everything that divines of the Waterland stamp thought worth defending. Middleton was warmly assailed from many quarters, and retreated with some difficulty under cover of a sheaf of apologetic pamphlets, and a more regular attendance at church. A freethinker in the strict sense of the term he certainly was; but how far freedom of thought was carried by him it is not easy to ascertain. His adversaries—some of them men who gravely maintained that Egyptian civilization originated in the age of Solomon—were unable to fix any serious imputation upon him; on the other hand it is clear that the natural attitude of his mind towards supernatural pretensions was one of suspicion, and that his temperament was by no means devout. That he was nevertheless not incapable of a disinterested hero-worship was evinced by his next important publication, the elegant but partial Life of Cicero (1741), a work which, if far below the standard of modern exactness, may yet compare in spirit and execution with the best productions of the Italian Renaissance. It is, indeed, as remarked by Forsyth, “rather an historical composition, in which Cicero is the principal figure, than the portrait of the man himself”; and Dr Parr has pointed out Middleton’s unacknowledged obligations to the forgotten Bellendenus, which, however, with the ardour of a discoverer, he seems to have considerably overrated. The work was undertaken at the instance of Lord Hervey, in correspondence with whom also originated his disquisition on The Roman Senate, published in 1747. The same year and the following produced the most important of all his writings, the Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry concerning the miraculous powers then commonly deemed to have subsisted in the church after the apostolic age. In combating this belief Middleton indirectly established two propositions of capital importance. He showed that ecclesiastical miracles must be accepted or rejected in the mass; and he distinguished between the authority due to the early fathers’ testimony to the beliefs and practices of their times and their very slender credibility as witnesses to matters of fact. Some individual grudge seems to have prompted him to expose, in 1750, Bishop Sherlock’s eccentric notions of antediluvian prophecy, which had then been before the world for a quarter of a century. The same year he died of a decline at his seat at Hildesham in Cambridgeshire, leaving a widow, but no children.

Middleton’s most ambitious work is obsolete from no fault of his, but his controversial writings retain a permanent place in the history of opinion. In his more restricted sphere he may not inappropriately be compared to Lessing. Like Lessing’s, the character of his intellect was captious and iconoclastic, but redeemed from mere negation by a passion for abstract truth, too apt to slumber until called into activity by some merely personal stimulus. His diction is generally masculine and harmonious. Pope thought him and Hooke the only prose writers of the day who deserved to be cited as authorities on the language. Parr, while exposing his plagiarisms, heaps encomiums on his style. But his best qualities, his impatience of superstition and disdain of mere external authority, are rather moral than literary. As a scholar he is rather elegant than profound; as a controversialist he has more vigour than urbanity, and more wit than humour. He has been unjustly attacked both as author and as man by De Quincey, who strangely accuses his style of colloquialism, and taxes him with eating the church’s bread while denying her doctrines. In fact Middleton’s private means were ample, his ecclesiastical emoluments trifling, and his candour obstructed his path to much more considerable preferment. The best general view of his intellectual character and influence is to be found in Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, chap. vi. A handsome edition of his works, containing several posthumous tracts, but not including the Life of Cicero, appeared in 1752.

MIDDLETON, Thomas (c. 1570-1627), held a leading place among the dramatists of the reign of James I. His popularity would seem to have first come to a height about 1607. This is a fair inference from the fact that in this and the following year a whole swarm of comedies from his pen were licensed and published— A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Family of Love, The Phoenix, Michaelmas Term, Your Five Gallants, A Mad World My Masters. Only the first of these kept the stage after the author’s own generation, though in point of wit and constructive skill it is not superior to The Phoenix (a serious comedy) or Your Five Gallants (a bustling and gaily humorous farcical comedy). The plot of the Trick bears a family likeness to that of Massinger’s New Way to Pay Old Debts·, the titles in fact might be interchanged. A ruined scapegrace outwits his creditors and a usurious uncle by coming to town with a courtesan and passing her off as a widow with a fortune, whom he treats with deferential friendship, but hardly dares to love, ruined and hopeless as he is. His uncle lends him money that he may woo in proper state; his creditors also intrigue to have the honour of supplying him with all the needs of fashion; and the lady receives many costly presents from aspirants to her hand and fortune. Though Middleton was apparently not in high popularity till 1607, he had made his debut as a satirist ten years before; and if Malone is right in his conjecture that the Mayor of Queensborough is identical with the Randall Earle of Chester mentioned by Henslowe in 1602, he had done dramatic work of a much higher kind. Like The Changeling, a later production, in which Middleton had the assistance of Rowley, the tragedy of the Mayor is named after a character in the insignificant comic underplot. Such a title scares away readers weary of half-intelligible Elizabethan fun and satire; but Simon the comic mayor is a very subordinate figure in the play, and the tragic portions alike in situation, characterization, and language rank among the very noblest productions of the Shakespearian age. There are scenes in the Changeling also which Mr Swinburne, with a judgment that will not be disputed, assigns to Middleton, unsurpassed for intensity of passion and appalling surprises in the whole range of Elizabethan literature. The execution of these scenes is far beyond any power that Rowley showed in single-handed work, but well within the scope of the author of the Mayor of Queensborough and Women Beware Women. This last play, in which every one of the characters important enough to be honoured with a name perishes at the end in a slaughter so rapid as to be somewhat confusing, was apparently one of Middleton’s later works, and the simple and measured development of the plot In the first acts seems to show traces of the influence of Massinger. Middleton’s verse, when charged with the expression of impassioned love, contains many echoes of the verse of Romeo and Juliet, as if his ear had been fascinated by it in his youth. His language generally proclaims him an admiring disciple of Shakespeare’s; and in daring and happy concentration of imagery, and a certain imperial confidence in the use of words, he of all the dramatists of that time is the disciple that comes nearest the master. The Witch, by which Middleton’s name has of late been linked with Shakespeare’s in groundless speculation as being part author of Macbeth, is by no means one of Middleton’s best plays. The plot is both intricate and feeble, as if the play had been written with a view to the half-comic spectacular exhibition of the witches, with their ribald revelry, their cauldrons, hideous spells, and weird incantations. Charles Lamb’s comparison of Middleton’s witches with Shakespeare’s is one of the most exquisite morsels of criticism; but, when he says that Middleton’s witches are “in a lesser degree fine creations,” he ought perhaps to have added that they are merely embodiments of the vulgar superstition, put on the stage to excite laughter rather than fear among a half-believing audience, an audience ready to laugh at them in the light and in a crowded meeting, whatever each might do in the dark alone. That Middleton had any share in Macbeth is a conjecture resting solely on the fact that the opening words of the song of the witches about the cauldron in Shakespeare’s Macbeth occur also in the incantations about a cauldron in the last act of Middleton’s Witch, and that Middleton’s song was inserted by Davenant in an “amended” reproduction of Macbeth. If either borrowed the words of this song from the other, that is no evidence of further co-operation; besides all that is common to the two was probably as much public property as a nursery rhyme. There is no evidence as to whether The Witch appeared before or after Macbeth. Middleton co-operated with Dekker in the Roaring Girl ; with Rowley in A Fair Quarrel, The Spanish Gipsy, and The Changeling; and with Jonson and Fletcher in The Widow (one of the few of Middleton’s plays reproduced after the Restoration). Towards the close of his life Middleton got into difficulties with the privy council from writing a very clever political play apropos of Prince Charles’s unsuccessful wooing of the Spanish infanta in 1623. The chief personages in Spanish politics and their manoeuvres were represented with most ingenious skill in the pieces and movements of A Game at Chess. This play was stopped by royal authority, and the prosecution of the author was allowed quietly to drop. The few unimportant facts known in Middleton’s private history are collected in Mr Dyce’s admirable edition of his plays. He enjoyed the office of city chronologer, and was often employed to write pageants and masques, in one case at least contracting for the whole exhibition, besides furnishing the words. He died in 1627, and was buried at Newington Butts.