CHAPTER III.

E were venturing upon almost sacred ground

when-in our last chapter- we had somewhat to say of the so-called King James' Bible; of how it came to bear that name; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of certain literary qualities belonging to it, which-however excellent other and possible future Bibles may be — will be pretty sure to keep it alive for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London; tracked him awhile there; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character; spared you the recital of a world of things-conjectural or eulogistic — which might be said of him;

and finally saw him go back to his old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman — last of all his plays and to die.

This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter-Shakespeare and the English Bible! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech, and who are eager to compass and enjoy its largest and keenest and simplest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants, and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary experimentation; but these twain furnish sufficient lingual armament for all new conquests in letters.

We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way-making a descriptive dash at some few of them-seeing the old pedant

of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain.

Webster, Ford, and Others.

All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.

Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly one time as "merchant tailor;" and

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there are other intimations that he may have held some church "clerkship;" but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame* had slipped away from people's knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist's deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dycet wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopædic writing in declaring this dramatist to be "hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world."

Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the

*The extreme limits of his life and career would probably lie between 1575 and 1635; Strahan's Biographical Dictionary of the last century makes no mention of him; nor does the Biographie Universelle of as early date.

Works of John Webster; with some account of the Author, and Notes, by Rev. A. Dyce (original edition,

humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known-the "Vittoria Corombona" and the "Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day-a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime's entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and

"do cover

The friendless bodies of unburied men."

When a man's flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.