was so prone--in Shakespeare's
phrase--to "talk greasily" as the authors of "Bartholomew Fair" and "The
Dutch Courtesan."

In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the interest is perhaps, on the
whole, rather better sustained than in "The Wonder of Women." The
prologue to "Antonio's Revenge" (the second part of the "Historie of
Antonio and Mellida") has enjoyed the double correlative honor of ardent
appreciation by Lamb and responsive depreciation by Gifford. Its
eccentricities and perversities of phrase[1] may be no less noticeable,
but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and
impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, wayward and
savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as
is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches
in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince
any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and
such dispraise. The youngest student of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly
fail to recognize this when he compares the vivid and piercing
description of the death of Mellida with the fearful and supernatural
impression of the scene which brings or thrusts before us the immolation
of the child, her brother.

[Footnote 1: One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a
palpable misprint--_ramps_ for _cramps_.]

The labored eccentricity of style which signalizes and disfigures the
three chief tragedies or tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued
to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational choice of expression in
his less ambitious and less unequal works. It is almost impossible to
imagine any insertion or addition from the hand of Webster which would
not be at once obvious to any reader in the text of "Sophonisba" or in
either part of "Antonio and Mellida." Their fierce and irregular
magnificence, their feverish and strenuous intemperance of rhetoric,
would have been too glaringly in contrast with the sublime purity of the
greater poet's thought and style In the tragicomedy of "The Malcontent,"
published two years later than the earlier and two years earlier than
the later of these poems, if the tone of feeling is but little changed
or softened, the language is duly clarified and simplified. "The
Malcontent, (augmented) by Marston, with the additions written by John
Webster," is as coherent, as harmonious, as much of a piece throughout,
as was the text of t