those
ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to
inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the
ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian,
respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to
such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written,
observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of
person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven
death in the passionate and weighty _Nuntius_; yet after all this divine
rapture, _O dura messorum ilia_, the breath that comes from the
uncapable multitude is able to poison it."

Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is the most
Shakespearian. His genius was not only influenced by its contact with
one side of Shakespeare's many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have
been considering abound in expressions and situations either suggested
by or directly copied from the tragedies of him he took for his model.
Yet he seems to have had no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare
to all other dramatists; and in his Preface to "The White Devil," after
speaking of the "full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the
labored and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy
composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master
Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without wrong last to be named," of
"the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master
Dekkar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felicitous a
classification as would be made by a critic of our century, who should
speak of the "right happy and copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master
Dickens, and Master G. P. R. James.

Webster's reference, however, to "the full and heightened style of
Master Chapman" is more appropriate; for no writer of that age impresses
us more by a certain rude heroic height of character than George
Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the University of Oxford, he
seems, on his first entrance into London life, to have acquired the
patronage of the noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and
scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. His
greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of
Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations
in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent
painter, we believe Barry