There is a depth of severe sense in them, a height of heroic scorn, or a
dignity of quiet cynicism, which can scarcely be paralleled in the
bitterest or the fiercest effusions of John Marston or Cyril Tourneur or
Jonathan Swift. Nay, were they not put into the mouth of a criminal
cynic, they would not seem unworthy of Epictetus. There is nothing so
grand in the part of Edmund; the one figure in Shakespeare whose aim in
life, whose centre of character, is one with the view or the instinct of
Webster's two typical villains. Some touches in the part of Flamineo
suggest, if not a conscious imitation, an unconscious reminiscence of
that prototype: but the essential and radical originality of Webster's
genius is shown in the difference of accent with which the same savage
and sarcastic philosophy of self-interest finds expression through the
snarl and sneer of his ambitious cynic. Monsters as they may seem of
unnatural egotism and unallayed ferocity, the one who dies penitent,
though his repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as any ever
wrought by miraculous conversion, dies as thoroughly in character as the
one who takes leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony
which hardly passes off at last into a mood of mocking and triumphant
resignation. There is a cross of heroism in almost all Webster's
characters which preserves the worst of them from such hatefulness as
disgusts us in certain of Fletcher's or of Ford's: they have in them
some salt of manhood, some savor of venturesome and humorous resolution,
which reminds us of the heroic age in which the genius that begot them
was born and reared--the age of Richard Grenville and Francis Drake,
Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

The earliest play of Webster's now surviving--if a work so piteously
mutilated and defaced can properly be said to survive--is a curious
example of the combined freedom and realism with which recent or even