talian wickedness with truly appalling
lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents,
have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us
of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.

Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the
compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time.
He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his
discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from
the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a
deep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceable
recollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-play
of 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of a
simple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with
conscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his fame
is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the
playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward
mannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect
upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up
of these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. The
characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct
of a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a _tableau
vivant_; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of
interpenetrative passions. That this mannerism was deliberately
chosen, we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, in
this kind have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may
object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model.
He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy
of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious
pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately
represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch