John, a distinguished dramatic author, was born in 1586 at Ilseington, in Devonshire. Little is known of his personal history, but that he was educated for the bar, became a member of the Middle Temple in 1602, and continued to devote himself to his profession as a means of support while prosecuting his labours as a dramatic littérateur. His earliest efforts as a writer for the stage were in joint authorship with Dekker and Webster; but thirteen plays are understood to have been exclusively his own. The Lover's Melancholy appeared in 1628; the Brother and Sister, the Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice, in 1633. These were followed by the spirited historical dramas, Perkin Warbeck, Fancies Chaste and Noble appeared in 1638, and the Ladie's Trial, which was his last work, in 1639. He is supposed to have died shortly afterwards. It is generally admitted that Ford's greatest drama is that called 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The unpleasant title indicates a plot still more repugnant to modern taste and feeling, embodying the development of an incestuous passion; but the poetry is of the highest order. The scenes in the Brother and Sister, in like manner, descriptive of the criminal loves of Annabella and Giovanni, are painfully interesting, and abound with passages of exquisite pathos and tenderness. It was usual with the old dramatists to employ their genius upon such themes as kindled the fires of passion. They lived in an age of excitement, and withdrew not themselves to study in retirement while the fierce conflict was raging around them between the newly awakened intellect and the long indulged appetites. With them the passion of love was a quenchless fire, before which the decencies of life were but as stubble; and though often wild and unnatural, it was not seldom imbued with preternatural sweetness as well as fervour. Nor even was the light of religion wholly quenched; there were glimpses of heaven in the midst of their darkest scenes of vice. Ford was pre-eminent among them for spending his poetic strength and building his reputation on unnatural and objectionable themes; but though his imagination was thus morbid, his personal deportment is said to have been by no means irregular; and Mr Hartley Coleridge suggests that it may merely have been as an exercise of intellectual power that he chose such horrible stories for his two best tragedies; and that "his moral sense was gratified by indignation at the dark possibilities of sin, and by compassion for rare extremes of suffering."