A far more creditable and workman-like piece of work, though glorified by no flashes of such sudden and singular beauty, is the tragedy of “Appius and Virginia.”  The almost infinite superiority of Webster to Fletcher as a poet of pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in construction and conduct of romantic story displayed in his attempt at a tragicomedy.  From the evidence of style I should judge this play to have been written at an earlier date than “The Devil’s Law-case”:  it is, I repeat, far better composed; better, perhaps, than any other play of the author’s:  but it has none of his more distinctive qualities; intensity of idea, concentration of utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of pathos.  It is written with noble and equable power of hand, with force and purity and fluency of apt and simple eloquence:  there is nothing in it unworthy of the writer:  but it is the only one of his unassisted works in which we do not find that especial note of tragic style, concise and pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which usually makes it impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the original tone or accent, of John Webster.  If the epithet unique had not such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this great poet.  But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt in upon us as we read the more Websterian scenes of Webster’s writing.  We feel, in short, that thus it may have been; not, as I observed at the opening of these notes, that thus it must have been.  The poem does him no discredit; nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence of powers more various and many-sided than we should otherwise have known or supposed in him.  Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of the finest types of soldierly and fatherly heroism ever presented on the stage:  there is equal force of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent passion, in the scene of his pleading before the senate on behalf of the claims of his suffering and struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene of his return to the camp after the immolation of his daughter.  The mere theatric effect of this latter scene is at once so triumphant and so dignified, so noble in its presentation and so passionate in its restraint, that we feel the high justice and sound reason of the instinct which inspired the poet to prolong the action of his play so far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine.  A comparison of Webster’s Virginius with any of Fletcher’s wordy warriors will suffice to show how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a tragic or a serious dramatist.  Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher, was not unjust in his remark