en a work so insufficient and incompetent as
Webster's "tragecomoedy" of "The Devil's Law-case." The noble and
impressive extracts from this most incoherent and chaotic of all plays
which must be familiar to all students of Charles Lamb are but patches
of imperial purple sewn on with the roughest of needles to a garment of
the raggedest and coarsest kind of literary serge. Hardly any praise can
be too high for their dignity and beauty, their lofty loyalty and
simplicity of chivalrous manhood or their deep sincerity of cynic
meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness: and the reader who turns
from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find
yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy. He will
find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that "the plot is of no
use except to bring in the fine things." The plot is in this instance
absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of
confused and distracting extravagance that the reader's attention may at
times be withdrawn from the all but unqualified ugliness of its ethical
tone or tendency. Two of Webster's favorite types, the meditative
murderer or philosophic ruffian, and the impulsive impostor who is
liable to collapse into the likeness of a passionate penitent, will
remind the reader how much better they appear in tragedies which are
carried through to their natural tragic end. But here, where the story
is admirably opened and the characters as skilfully introduced, the
strong interest thus excited at starting is scattered or broken or
trifled away before the action is half-way through: and at its close the
awkward violence or irregularity of moral and scenical effect comes to a
crowning crisis in the general and mutual condonation of unnatural
perjury and attempted murder with which the victims and the criminals
agree to hush up all grudges, shake hands all round, and live happy ever
after. There is at least one point of somewhat repulsive resemblance
between the story of this play and that of Fletcher's "Fair Maid of the
Inn": but Fletcher's play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes
of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster's,
is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more
interesting, and more intelligent if not more imaginative.

A far more creditable and workman-like piece of work, though glorified
by no flashes of such sudden and singular beauty, is th