of the commonest
circumstances:

Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where
this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and
lower.

When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are
raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders.

I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the
feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.

A soldier is twitted with serving his master:

As witches do their serviceable spirits,
Even with thy prodigal blood.

An adulterous couple get this curse:

Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather,
Let him cleave to her, and both rot together.

A bravo is asked:

Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood,
And not be tainted with a shameful fall?
Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree,
Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves,
And yet to prosper?

It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet
Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may
fairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according to
the grimness of his melancholy, are:

Only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

* * * * *

We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded
Which way please them.

* * * * *

Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague.

A Duchess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the
executioner, in this high fantastical oration:

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of
green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk,
fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c.

Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in
these lyric verses:

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.

The greatness of the world passes by with all its glory:

Vain the ambition of kings,
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

It would be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; where
Webster is wri