her
author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are
serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with mirth. But in a
lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their
power, too, is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars,
jealousies, strifes, "like a thick scurf" over life.

* * * * *

WILLIAM ROWLEY,--THOMAS DECKER,--JOHN FORD, ETC.

_The Witch of Edmonton_.--Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs
from the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain,
traditional old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and
ignorant; the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That
should he a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county at his heels,
that would lay hands on the Weird Sisters. They are of another
jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, the author
(or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something
frightfully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar.

* * * * *

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

_The Revenger's Tragedy_.--The reality and life of the dialogue, in
which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then
threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their
sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but
my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I
were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the
brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen
and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such
power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike
guilty creatures unto the soul, but to "appall" even those that are
"free."

* * * * *

JOHN WEBSTER.

_The Duchess of Malfy_.--All the several parts of the dreadful
apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the
waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the
tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification
by degrees,--are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary
vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to
bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets.
As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems
not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is become
"native and endowed unto that element." Sh