tter away. Of the
two brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee and
murderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonable
excuse. Ferdinand, the other, is no doubt mad enough, but not interestingly
mad, and no attempt is made to account in any way satisfactorily for the
delay of his vengeance. By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of
the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck
on without art or reason. But the extraordinary force and beauty of the
scene where the duchess is murdered; the touches of poetry, pure and
simple, which, as in the _The White Devil_, are scattered all over the
play; the fantastic accumulation of terrors before the climax; and the
remarkable character of Bosola,--justify the high place generally assigned
to the work. True, Bosola wants the last touches, the touches which
Shakespere would have given. He is not wholly conceivable as he is. But as
a "Plain Dealer" gone wrong, a "Malcontent" (Webster's work on that play
very likely suggested him), turned villain, a man whom ill-luck and
fruitless following of courts have changed from a cynic to a scoundrel, he
is a strangely original and successful study. The dramatic flashes in the
play would of themselves save it. "I am Duchess of Malfi still," and the
other famous one "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," often
as they have been quoted, can only be quoted again. They are of the first
order of their kind, and, except the "already _my_ De Flores!" of _The
Changeling_, there is nothing in the Elizabethan drama out of Shakespere to
match them.

There is no doubt that some harm has been done to Thomas Heywood by the
enthusiastic phrase in which Lamb described him as "a prose Shakespere."
The phrase itself is in the original quite carefully and sufficiently
explained and qualified. But unluckily a telling description of the kind is
sure to go far, while its qualifications remain behind; and (especially
since a reprint by Pearson in the year 1874 made the plays of Heywood, to
which one or two have since been added more or less conjecturally by the
industry of Mr. Bullen, accessible as a whole) a certain revolt has been
manifested against the encomium. This revolt is the effect of haste. "A
prose Shakespere" suggests to incautious readers something like Swift, like
Taylor, like Carlyle,--something approaching in prose the supremacy of
Shakespere in verse. But