absolute command in a strictly limited province of reflection and emotion—­was born and lived and moved and had its being.  The double mainspring of its energy is not difficult to define:  its component parts are simply adoration of good and abhorrence of evil:  all other sources of emotion were subordinate to these:  love, hate, resentment, resignation, self-devotion, are but transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage, which pass away and leave only the sombre fire of meditative indignation still burning among the ruins of shattered hopes and lives.  More splendid success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been achieved by Shakespeare or by Webster than by Cyril Tourneur in his moments of happiest invention or purest inspiration:  but the intensity of his moral passion has broken the outline and marred the symmetry of his general design.  And yet he was at all points a poet:  there is an accent of indomitable self-reliance, a note of persistence and resistance more deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle.  The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the “damned race,” the hopeless horde of millions “mostly fools” too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his biographer.  On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable amount of pains.  A reader of his introduction who had never studied the text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:  whereas it is hardly too much to say that the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur’s moral rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent ineptitude of Byron’s.

It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the popes, “I have loved justice, and hated iniquity:  therefore I die in exile”; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work.  But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in the tumultuous and electric