Flam. I would I were from hence.

Cor. Do you hear, sir?

I'll give you a saying which my grandmother

Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute.

Flam. Do, an you will, do.

Cor. Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,

[Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction.

Since o'er shady groves they hover,

And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole

The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,

To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that 's foe to men,
For with his nails he 'll dig them up again.'
They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel;
But I have an answer for them:

'Let holy church receive him duly,

Since he paid the church-tithes truly.'
His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store;
This poor men get, and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all, good people!

[Exeunt Cornelia, Zanche, and Ladies. Flam. I have a strange thing in me, to the which

I cannot give a name, without it be

Compassion. I pray, leave me."

In the trial scene the defiant haughtiness of Vittoria, entrenched in her illustrious birth, against the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of Browning's Ottima, "magnificent in sin," excites a sympathy which must check itself if it would not become admiration. She dies with the same unconquerable spirit, not shaming in death at least the blood of the Vitelli that ran in her veins. As

to Flamineo, I think it plain that but for Iago he would never have existed; and it has always interested me to find in Webster more obvious reminiscences of Shakespeare, without conscious imitation of him, than in any other dramatist of the time. Indeed, the style of Shakespeare cannot be imitated, because it is the expression of his individual genius. Coleridge tells us that he thought he was copying it when writing the tragedy of "Remorse," and found, when all was done, that he had reproduced Massinger instead. Iago seems to me one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary divinations. He has embodied in him the corrupt Italian intellect of the Renaissance. Flamineo is a more degraded example of the same type, but without Iago's motives of hate and revenge. He is a mere incarnation of selfish sensuality. These two tragedies of "Vittoria Corombona" and the "Duchess of Malfi" are, I should say, the most vivid pictures of that repulsively fascinating period that we have in English. Alfred de Musset's "Lorenzaccio " is, however, far more terrible, because there the horror is moral wholly, and never physical, as too often in Webster.

There is something in Webster that reminds me of Victor Hugo. There is the same confusion at times of what is big with what is great, the same fondness for the merely spectacular, the same insensibility to repulsive details, the same indifference to the probable or even to the natural, the same leaning toward the grotesque, the same love of effect at whatever cost; and there is also the same

impressiveness of result. Whatever other effect Webster may produce upon us, he never leaves us indifferent. We may blame, we may criticise, as much as we will; we may say that all this ghastliness is only a trick of theatrical blue-light; we shudder, and admire nevertheless. We may say he is melodramatic, that his figures are magic-lantern pictures that waver and change shape with the curtain on which they are thrown: it matters not; he stirs us with an emotion deeper than any mere artifice could stir.

IV

CHAPMAN

As I turn from one to another of the old dramatists, and see how little is known about their personal history, I find a question continually coming back, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, which I shall endeavor to fan away by a little discussion. This question is whether we gain or lose by our ignorance of the personal details of their history. Would it make any difference in our enjoyment of what they wrote, if we had the means of knowing that one of them was a good son, or the other a bad husband? that one was a punctual paymaster, and that the other never paid his washer-woman for the lustration of the legendary single shirt without which he could not face a neglectful world, or hasten to the theatre with the manuscript of the new play for which posterity was to be more thankful than the manager? Is it a love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of the living? The law is more scrupulous than we in maintaining the inviolability of private letters. Are we to profit by every indiscretion, by every

breach of confidence? Of course, in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside. And yet how much do we really know even of men who profess to admit us to every corner of their nature of Montaigne? of Rousseau? As in the box under the table at which the automaton chess-player sat, there is always a closet within that which is so frankly opened to us, and into this the enigma himself absconds while we are staring at nothing in the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the author is off his guard, that we make our discoveries. In a man's works we read between the lines, not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense interest in watching the process by which a detective critic like Sainte-Beuve dogs his hero or his victim, as the case may be, with tireless sympathy or vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, and constructing out of the life a comment on the works, or, again, from the works divining the character. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias with which the inquisition is conducted, and, after assisting at this process in the case of Châteaubriand, for example, are we sure that we know the man better, or only what was morbid in the man, which, perhaps, it was not profitable for us to know?