horror. His mastery in this
region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful
woman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she
but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle
ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude,
amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the
victim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotistical
ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the
semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the
dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in
her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are
insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature.
When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her
breath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says:

Farewell, Cariola!
I pray thee look thou givest my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.

In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of
madness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comes
when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of
the flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch of
thrilling pathos.

The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened
man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body
of his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back to
life again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, already
overstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of the
grave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of the
injured Duchess.

Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess. He had
to paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in her
widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this
unequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salient
qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy
with her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a Duchess;
and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low
gate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the lines
already quoted, that the woman still survives.

The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portr