power, but it is power. I remember seeing a picture in some Belgian church where an angel makes a motion to arrest the hand of the Almighty just as it is stretched forth in the act of the creation. If the angel foresaw that the world to be created was to be such a one as Webster conceived, we can fully understand his impulse. Through both plays there is a vapor of fresh blood and a scent of church-yard mould in the air. They are what children call creepy. Ghosts are ready at any moment: they seem, indeed, to have formed a considerable part of the population in those days. As an instance of the almost ludicrous way in which they were employed, take this stage direction from Chapman's "Revenge of Bussy d' Ambois." "Music, and the ghost of Bussy enters leading the ghosts of the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatillon; they dance about the body and exeunt." It is fair to say that Webster's ghosts are far from comic.

Let me briefly analyze "The White Devil." Vittoria Corombona, a beautiful woman, is married to Camillo, whom she did not love. She becomes the paramour of the Duke of Brachiano, whose Duchess is the sister of Francesco de' Medici and of Cardinal Monticelso. One of the brothers of Vittoria, Flamineo, is secretary to Brachiano, and contrives to murder Camillo for them. Vittoria, as there is no sufficient proof to fix the charge of murder upon her, is tried for incontinency, and sent to a house of Convertites, whence Brachiano spirits her away, meaning to marry her. In the

mean while Brachiano's Duchess is got out of the way by poison; the lips of his portrait, which she kisses every night before going to bed, having been smeared with a deadly drug to that end. There is a Count Ludovico, who had proffered an unholy love to the Duchess, but had been repulsed by her, and he gladly offers himself as the minister of vengeance. Just as Brachiano is arming for a tournament arranged for the purpose by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Florence, Ludovico poisons his helmet, so that he shortly dies in torture. Ludovico then murders Vittoria, Zanche, her Moorish maid, and Flamineo, and is himself shot by the guards of the young Duke Giovanni, son of Brachiano, who break in upon him just as he has completed his butchery. There are but four characters in the play unstained with crime - Cornelia, Vittoria's mother; Marcello, her younger son; the Duchess of Brachiano; and her son, the young Duke. There are three scenes in the play remarkable for their effectiveness, or for their power in different ways-the trial scene of Vittoria, the death scene of Brachiano, and that of Vittoria. There is another the burial of Marcello - which is pathetic as few men have known how to be so simply and with so little effort as Webster.

Is

"Fran. de' Med. Your reverend mother

grown a very old woman in two hours.

I found them winding of Marcello's corse;

And there is such a solemn melody,
"Tween doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies-
Such as old grandams watching by the dead
Were wont to outwear the nights with

that, believe me,

I had no eyes to guide me forth the room,

They were so o'ercharg'd with water.

Flam. I will see them.

Fran. de' Med. 'T were much uncharity in you, for your sight

Will add unto their tears.

Flam. I will see them:

They are behind the traverse; I'll discover

Their superstitious howling.

[Draws the curtain. Cornelia, Zanche, and three other Ladies discovered winding Marcello's corse.

Cor. This rosemary is wither'd; pray, get fresh ;

I would have these herbs grow up in his grave
When I am dead and rotten. Reach the bays;
I'll tie a garland here about his head;

"T will keep my boy from lightning. This sheet
I have kept this twenty year, and every day
Hallow'd it with my prayers. I did not think
He should have wore it.

Zanche. Look you who are yonder.

Cor. O, reach me the flowers.

Zanche. Her ladyship's foolish.

Lady. Alas, her grief

Hath turn'd her child again!

Cor. You're very welcome :

There's rosemary for you; and rue for you;

[To Flamineo.

Heart's-ease for you; I pray make much of it:

I have left more for myself.

Fran. de' Med. Lady, who's this?

Cor. You are, I take it, the grave-maker.

Flam. So.

Zanche. 'Tis Flamineo.

A song.

Cor. Will you make me such a fool? Here's a white hand :

Can blood so soon be wash'd out? Let me see:

When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops,

And the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops,

When yellow spots do on your hands appear,

Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.

Out upon 't, how 't is speckled! h'as handled a toad, sure.
Cowslip-water is good for the memory:

Pray, buy me three ounces of 't.

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