od-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To
him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the
contemporary play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has assigned
the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by
Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to which I
have just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his
command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the
graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and
as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All
other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than
Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious
ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a
profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the color of
tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music
into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key
in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was
to put to so deeply different an use.

Walking in a valley greene,
Spred with Flora summer queene:
Where shee heaping all hir graces,
Niggard seem'd in other places:
Spring it was, and here did spring
All that nature forth can bring.

(_Tullies Loue_, p. 53, ed. 1589.)

Nights were short, and daies were long;
Blossoms on the Hauthorns hung:
Philomele (Night-Musiques King)
Tolde the comming of the spring.

(_Grosart's Barnfield_ [1876], p. 97.)

On a day (alack the day!)
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.

(_Love's Labor's Lost_, act iv., sc. iii.)

And now let us hear Webster.

Hearke, now every thing is still,
The Scritch-Owle, and the whistler shrill,
Call upon our Dame, aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shrowd:
Much you had of Land and rent,
Your length in clay's now competent.
A long war disturb'd your minde,
Here your perfect peace is sign'd.
Of what is't, fooles make such vaine keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
Their life, a generall mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storme of terror.
Strew your haire with powders sweete:
Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete,
And (the foule feend more to checke)
A crucifixe let blesse your necke:
'Tis now full tide 't