weene night and day,
End your groane, and come away.

(_The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy_: 1623: sig. K, K 2.)

The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and
simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note,
are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic
significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close.
Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and
Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of
bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do
for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers
attendant on the dead.

The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these
deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts
may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and
simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into
infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames
the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by
relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too
early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or
redemption. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic
humor in all Webster's writings than that conveyed in the scornful and
acute reply--almost too acute perhaps for the character--of Bosola's
remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument
against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: "Thy pity
is nothing akin to thee." He has more in common with Romelio in "The
Devil's Law-case," an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into
penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and
stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like
a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned
and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the
fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such
sudden snatches of funereal verse as this:

How then can any monument say
"Here rest these bones till the last day,"
When Time, swift both of foot and feather,
May bear them the sexton kens not whither?
What care I, then, though my last sleep
Be in the desert or the deep,
No lamp nor taper, day and night,
To give my charnel