ars
None of our family dies, but there is seen
The shape of an old woman; which is given
By tradition to us to have been murdered
By her nephews for her riches.

Apparitions haunt them:

How tedious is a guilty conscience!
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me.

Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred,
preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts
will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; the
headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every
arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it
trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry:

On pain of death, let no man name death to me;
It is a word infinitely horrible.

And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes:

O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

After their death, this is their epitaph:

These wretched eminent things
Leave no more fame behind'em than should one
Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow.

Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in
execution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avarice
take possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash of
repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of
insanity. He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic,
and to be run through the body by his paid assassin. In the Cardinal
of Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous,
blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of
Calabria. It seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of his
Italian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In the
lawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the godless
ecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian society
was actually suffering.

It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of
Webster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch no
finer chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he
is even more powerful than in that of