ud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who have
missed their Rubicon and collapse into the likeness of a Catiline--is a
sign rather of his noble English loathing for the traditions associated
with such names as Caesar and Medici and Borgia, Catiline and Iscariot
and Napoleon, than of any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of
historic crime. Flamineo especially, the ardent pimp, the enthusiastic
pandar, who prostitutes his sister and assassinates his brother with
such earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own straightforward
self-interest, has in him a sublime fervor of rascality which recalls
rather the man of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of December and
of Sedan. He has something too of Napoleon's ruffianly good-humor--the
frankness of a thieves' kitchen or an imperial court, when the last thin
fig-leaf of pretence has been plucked off and crumpled up and flung
away. We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating
memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch.
As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp--more like
the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who
fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his
triumphs. But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg--so
dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we
feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two
destinations appropriate for the close of his career--a gibbet or a
throne.

This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning
complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most
notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster's latest
masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on
a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and
treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud. There
is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part
of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is
as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent
emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution.
The one is a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not
with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such
magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly
and strangely, from the bitter and blo