would have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few.
For in the minor artist the passionate--the elemental quality--is not
often found: he being of his essence the ape or zany of his betters.
Tourneur is not a great tragic. _The Atheist's Tragedy_ is but
grotesquely and extravagantly horrible; its personages are caricatures of
passion; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid; its incidents are absurd
when they are not simply abominable. But it is written in excellent
dramatic verse and in a rich and brilliant diction, and it contains a
number of pregnant epithets and ringing lines and violent phrases. And
if you halve the blame and double the praise you will do something less
than justice to that _Revenger's Tragedy_ which is Tourneur's
immortality. After all its companion is but a bastard of the loud,
malignant, antic muse of Marston; the elegies are cold, elaborate, and
very tedious; the _Transformed Metamorphosis_ is better verse but harder
reading than _Sordello_ itself. But the _Revenger's Tragedy_ has merit
as a piece of art and therewith a rare interest as a window on the
artist's mind. The effect is as of a volcanic landscape. An earthquake
has passed, and among grisly shapes and blasted aspects here lurks and
wanders the genius of ruin.

WALTON

The Compleat Angler.

I am told that it is generally though silently admitted that, while
Charles Cotton came of a school of fishermen renowned for accomplishment
even now, his master and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sense
a fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of the
philosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of the
artist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockney
sportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill; his prey
was commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for he
knew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such base
creatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace; and that
part of his treatise which has still a certain authority--which may be
said, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something of
a scientific basis--was not his work but that of 'my most honoured
friend, Charles Cotton, Esq.' Again, it is a characteristic of your true
as opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto by
hunger, he does not eat what he has killed; and it is a characteristic of
Walto