chargeable light?
I have there like quantity of ground,
And at the last day I shall be found.

The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and
sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is
perceptible here and there in "The Duchess of Malfy," but comes to its
head in "The Devil's Law-case." It cannot, I fear, be denied that
Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre "whose
service is perfect freedom"--as Shakespeare found it, and combined with
perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and
sublime and spontaneous and accurate expression. I can only conjecture
that this greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided out of his
natural line of writing as exemplified and perfected in the tragedy of
Vittoria, and lured into this cross and crooked by-way of immetrical
experiment, by the temptation of some theory or crotchet on the score of
what is now called naturalism or realism; which, if there were any real
or natural weight in the reasoning that seeks to support it, would of
course do away, and of course ought to do away, with dramatic poetry
altogether: for if it is certain that real persons do not actually
converse in good metre, it is happily no less certain that they do not
actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of so great a tragic poet
as Webster a peculiar and impressive effect may now and then be produced
by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writing; it certainly suits
well with the thoughtful and fantastic truculence of Bosola's
reflections on death and dissolution and decay--his "talk fit for a
charnel," which halts and hovers between things hideous and things
sublime. But it is a step on the downward way that leads to the negation
or the confusion of all distinctions between poetry and prose; a result
to which it would be grievous to think that the example of Shakespeare's
greatest contemporary should in any way appear to conduce.

The doctrine or the motive of chance (whichever we may prefer to call
it) is seen in its fullest workings and felt in its furthest bearings by
the student of Webster's masterpiece. The fifth act of "The Duchess of
Malfy" has been assailed on the very ground which it should have been
evident to a thoughtful and capable reader that the writer must have
intended to take up--on the ground that the whole upshot of the story is
dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere error, and guided by pure