In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to Hieronymo.  I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit.  I thought that Webster might have furnished them.  They seemed full of that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy.  On second consideration, I think this a hasty criticism.  They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus.  The sorrows of the Duchess set inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating conversation in a kind of bravery.

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JOHN FORD.

The Broken Heart.—­I do not know where to find, in any play, a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this.  This is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high actions.  The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled.  Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering.  These torments

  “On the purest spirits prey,
  As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
  With answerable pains, but more intense.”

What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its weaknesses!  Who would be less weak than Calantha?  Who can be so strong?  The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which we dare no more than hint a reference.  Ford was of the first order of poets.  He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.  There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the elements.  Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Annabella, in the play[1] which stands at the head of the modern collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature.

[Footnote:  “’Tis Pity she’s a Whore.”]

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FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.