318 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



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, un- 

 do this button " of Lear, by which Shakespeare makes us 

 feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the 

 bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to 

 deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and 

 forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the 

 broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of 

 Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered 

 by his own procurement : 



" Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young." 



He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who 

 squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, 

 but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concet- 

 tisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are 

 worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that re- 

 mind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases 

 of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples : 



" Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon, 

 As some fantastics dream, I could wish all men, 

 The whole race of them, for their inconstancy, 

 Sent thither to people that! " 



(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech 

 was the first faithless lover, he adds, 



" And he invented tents, unless men lie," 

 implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.) 



" Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds : 

 In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study, 

 For the scholar ; in the furrows of the sea, 

 For men of our profession [merchants] ; all of which 

 Arise and spring up honor." 



("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.) 



" Poor Jolenta ! should she hear of this, 

 She would not after the report keep fresh, 

 So long as flowers on graves." 



