falsify highways And put his life between the judge’s lips, To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men To beat their valors for her?  Surely we’re all mad people, and they[2] Whom we think are, are not:  we mistake those:  ’Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.

   Hippolito.  ’Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our due.

Vindice.  Does every proud and self-affecting dame Camphire her face for this? and grieve her Maker In sinful baths of milk—­when many an infant starves, For her superfluous outside,—­all for this?

[Footnote 1:  This is not, I take it, one of the poet’s irregular though not unmusical lines; the five short unemphatic syllables, rapidly run together in one slurring note of scorn, being not more than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as would take their places if the verse were thus altered—­and impaired: 

   For the poor price of one bewitching minute.]

   [Footnote 2:  Perhaps we might venture here to read—­“and only they.” 
   In the next line, “whom” for “who” is probably the poet’s own license
   or oversight.]

What follows is no whit less noble:  but as much may be said of the whole part—­and indeed of the whole play.  Violent and extravagant as the mere action or circumstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain and the heart of the workman are equally recognizable.  But the crowning example of Cyril Tourneur’s unique and incomparable genius is of course to be found in the scene which would assuredly be remembered, though every other line of the poet’s writing were forgotten, by the influence of its passionate inspiration on the more tender but not less noble sympathies of Charles Lamb.  Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy which attributes to the verse of Tourneur a more fiery quality, a more thrilling and piercing note of sublime and agonizing indignation, than that which animates and inflames the address of Hamlet to a mother less impudent in infamy than Vindice’s cannot be considered excessive by any capable reader who will candidly and carefully compare the two scenes which suggested this comparison.  To attempt the praise or the description of anything that has been praised or described by Lamb would usually be the veriest fatuity of presumption; and yet it is impossible to write of a poet whose greatness was first revealed to his countrymen by the greatest gritic of dramatic poetry who ever lived and wrote, and not to echo his words of righteous judgement and inspired applause with more or less feebleness of reiteration.  The startling and magical power of single verses, ineffaceable and ineradicable from the memory on which they have once impressed themselves, the consciousness in which they have once