great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an
influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the
right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's
before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more
exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most
daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him
there was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine tragedy in our
language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made
straight, for Shakespeare.



JOHN WEBSTER


There were many poets in the age of Shakespeare who make us think, as we
read them, that the characters in their plays could not have spoken more
beautifully, more powerfully, more effectively, under the circumstances
imagined for the occasion of their utterance: there are only two who
make us feel that the words assigned to the creatures of their genius
are the very words they must have said, the only words they could have
said, the actual words they assuredly did say. Mere literary power, mere
poetic beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic fancy, we find in
varying degrees dispersed among them all alike; but the crowning gift of
imagination, the power to make us realize that thus and not otherwise it
was, that thus and not otherwise it must have been, was given--except by
exceptional fits and starts--to none of the poets of their time but only
to Shakespeare and to Webster.

Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a limb of Shakespeare: but