This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning
complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most
notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster's latest
masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on
a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and
treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud. There
is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part
of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is
as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent
emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution.
The one is a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not
with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such
magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly
and strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To
him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the
contemporary play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has assigned
the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by
Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to which I
have just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his
command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the
graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and
as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All
other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than
Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious
ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a
profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the color of
tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music
into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key
in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was