LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 233 



poets some of them were ; but though imagination and the 

 power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and 

 even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the 

 rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those 

 faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the 

 loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. 

 We suspect that Shakspeare will long continue the only spe 

 cimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, 

 either force what they call a humour till it becomes fantastical, 

 or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human 

 nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy 

 without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the 

 cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new 

 edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another 

 witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakspeare s 

 stand-point as poet and artist. 



Webster s most famous works are The Duchess of Malfy 

 aad * Vittoria Corombona, but we are strongly inclined to call 

 The Devil s Law-Case his best play. The two former are in a 

 great measure answerable for the spasmodic school of poets, 

 since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imi 

 tation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is 

 incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of 

 a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aris 

 totle s admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Ter 

 rible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than 

 in the Duchess and Vittoria. His nature had something of 

 the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager 

 on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. 

 We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Web 

 ster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El 

 Dorado, whose micaceous sand, even, was treasured as aurife 

 rous and no wonder, in a generation which admired the 

 Botanic Garden. Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his 

 day, and himself calls his Vittoria Corombona a night-piece. 

 Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as 

 something pervading a whole character and making it consist 

 ent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire 

 tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each other and 

 tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in 

 his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic 

 intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. 

 The prithee, undo this button of Lear, by which Shakspeare 



