are so easily played upon and blown about by every gust of penitence or temptation; but there is the same life-like vigor of touch in the smallest detail of the scenes between her children and herself.  It has been objected that her ready avowal of weakness as common to all her sex is the undramatic epigram of a satirist, awkwardly ventriloquizing through the mechanism of a tragic puppet; but it is really quite in keeping with the woman’s character to enlarge and extenuate the avowal of her own infamy and infirmity into a sententious reflection on womanhood in general.  A similar objection has been raised against the apparent change of character implied in the confession made by the hero to the duke elect, at the close of the play, that he and his brother had murdered the old duke—­“all for your grace’s good,” and in the cry when arrested and sentenced to instant execution, “Heart, was’t not for your good, my lord?” But if this seems incompatible with the high sense of honor and of wrong which is the mainspring of Vindice’s implacable self-devotion and savage unselfishness, the unscrupulous ferocity of the means through which his revenge is worked out may surely be supposed to have blunted the edge of his moral perception, distorted his natural instinct, and infected his nobler sympathies with some taint of contagious egotism and pessimistic obduracy of imagination.  And the intensity of sympathy with which this crowning creation of the poet’s severe and fiery genius is steadily developed and displayed should make any critic of reasonable modesty think more than twice or thrice before he assumes or admits the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an error or so grave a defect in the conception of so great an artist.  For if the claim to such a title might be disputed in the case of a claimant who could show no better credentials than his authorship of “The Atheist’s Tragedy”—­and even in that far from faultless work of genius there are manifest and manifold signs, not merely of excellence, but of greatness—­the claim of the man who could write “The Revenger’s Tragedy” is questionable by no one who has any glimmering of insight or perception as to what qualities they are which confer upon a writer the indisputable title to a seat in the upper house of poets.

This master work of Cyril Tourneur, the most perfect and most terrible incarnation of the idea of retribution impersonate and concentrated revenge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic poet or the vigils of a future tyrannicide, is resumed and embodied in a figure as original and as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever felt the savage fascination of its presence, as any of the humaner figures evoked and immortalized by Shakespeare.  The rage of Swift, without his insanity and impurity, seems to utter in every word the healthier if no less consuming passion of a heart lacerated by indignation and envenomed by contempt as absolute, as relentless, and as inconsolable as