his own.  And in the very torrent of the man’s meditative and solitary passion, a very Phlegethon of agony and fury and ravenous hunger after the achievement of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten.  The mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester:  the lover, with the skull of his murdered mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections on the influence of her living beauty as would beseem a sexless and malignant satirist of her sex.  This power of self-abstraction from the individual self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal wrong, this contemptuous yet passionate scrutiny of the very emotions which rend the heart and inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of the thinker, is the special seal or sign of original inspiration which distinguishes the type most representative of Tourneur’s genius, most significant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force.  Such a conception, clothed in mere prose or in merely passable verse, would be proof sufficient of the mental power which conceived it; when expressed in such verse as follows, it proves at once and preserves forever the claim of the designer to a place among the immortals: 

   Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love,
   My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,
   Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
   When life and beauty naturally filled out
   These ragged imperfections;
   When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set
   In these unsightly rings;—­then ’twas a face
   So far beyond the artificial shine
   Of any woman’s bought complexion
   That the uprightest man (if such there be,
   That sin but seven times a day) broke custom
   And made up eight with looking after her.

The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce and savage pathos in the note of it; a cadence which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter as utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weeping and wailing, for curses or for prayers, than anything in dramatic poetry outside the part of Hamlet.  It would be a conjecture not less plausible than futile, though perhaps not less futile than plausible, which should suggest that the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet may be responsible for the creation of Tourneur’s Vindice, and the influence of Tourneur’s Vindice for the creation of Shakespeare’s Timon.  It is a certainty indisputable except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William Shakespeare.  The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike the general style of either.  And if, as his first