hope and love.  There is not a breath of rant, not a pad of bombast, in the declamation which fills its dazzling scenes with fire:  the language has no more perfect models of style than the finest of its more sustained and elevated passages.  The verse is unlike any other man’s in the solemn passion of its music:  if it reminds us of Shakespeare’s or of Webster’s, it is simply by right of kinship and equality of power with the most vivid and sonorous verse that rings from the lips of Coriolanus or of Timon, of Brachiano or the Duchess of Malfy; not by any servility of discipleship or reverberation of an imitative echo.  It is so rich and full and supple, so happy in its freedom and so loyal in its instinct, that its veriest audacities and aberrations have an indefinable harmony of their own.  Even if we admit that Tourneur is to Webster but as Webster is to Shakespeare, we must allow, by way of exception to this general rule of relative rank, that in his noblest hours of sustained inspiration he is at least the equal of the greater dramatist on the score of sublime and burning eloquence, poured forth in verse like the rushing of a mighty wind, with fitful breaks and pauses that do but enhance the majestic sweetness and perfection of its forward movement, the strenuous yet spontaneous energy of its triumphant ardor in advance.

To these magnificent qualities of poetry and passion no critic of the slightest note or the smallest pretention to poetic instinct has ever failed to do ample and cordial justice:  but to the truthfulness and the power of Cyril Tourneur as a dramatic student and painter of human character not only has such justice not generally been done, but grave injustice has been too generally shown.  It is true that not all the agents in the evolution of his greater tragedy are equally or sufficiently realized and vivified as active and distinct figures:  true, for instance, that the two elder sons of the duchess are little more than conventional outlines of such empty violence and futile ambition as might be inferred from the crude and puerile symbolism of their respective designations:  but the third brother is a type no less living than revolting and no less dramatic than detestable:  his ruffian cynicism and defiant brutality are in life and death alike original and consistent, whether they express themselves in curses or in jeers.  The brother and accomplice of the hero in the accomplishment of his manifold revenge is seldom much more than a serviceable shadow:  but there is a definite difference between their sister and the common type of virginal heroine who figures on the stage of almost every dramatist then writing; the author’s profound and noble reverence for goodness gives at once precision and distinction to the outline and a glow of active life to the color of this pure and straightforward study.  The brilliant simplicity of tone which distinguishes the treatment of this character is less remarkable in the figure of the mother whose wickedness and weakness