that we feel the high justice and sound reason of the
instinct which inspired the poet to prolong the action of his play so
far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Webster's
Virginius with any of Fletcher's wordy warriors will suffice to show
how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a
tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher,
was not unjust in his remark "what strange self-trumpeters and tongue
bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are"; and again
almost immediately--"all B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or
cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the 'claret' they
have shed." There is nothing of this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself
has not represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the person of
Coriolanus or of Brutus, "the high Roman fashion" of austere and heroic
self-respect. In the other leading or dominant figure of this tragedy
there is certainly discernible a genuine and thoughtful originality or
freshness of conception; but perhaps there is also recognizable a
certain inconsistency of touch. It was well thought of to mingle some
alloy of goodness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to represent
the treacherous and lecherous decemvir as neither kindless nor
remorseless, but capable of penitence and courage in his last hour. But
Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have prepared us with more care
and more dexterity for the revelation of some such redeeming quality in
a character which in the act immediately preceding Webster has
represented as utterly heartless and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy
and impudent in its brutality.

If the works already discussed were their author's only claims to
remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher
level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker
and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on
the other. "Antonio and Mellida," "Old Fortunatus," or "The
Changeling"--"The Maid's Tragedy," "The Duke of Milan," or "The
Traitor"--would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to
outbalance) the merit of the best among these: the fitful and futile
inspiration of "The Devil's Law-case," and the stately but subdued
inspiration of "Appius and Virginia." That his place was with no
subordinate poet--that his station is at Shakespeare's right hand--the
evidence supplied by his two great tragedies i