“what strange self-trumpeters and tongue bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are”; and again almost immediately—­“all B. and F.’s generals are pugilists, or cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the ‘claret’ they have shed.”  There is nothing of this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself has not represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the person of Coriolanus or of Brutus, “the high Roman fashion” of austere and heroic self-respect.  In the other leading or dominant figure of this tragedy there is certainly discernible a genuine and thoughtful originality or freshness of conception; but perhaps there is also recognizable a certain inconsistency of touch.  It was well thought of to mingle some alloy of goodness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to represent the treacherous and lecherous decemvir as neither kindless nor remorseless, but capable of penitence and courage in his last hour.  But Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have prepared us with more care and more dexterity for the revelation of some such redeeming quality in a character which in the act immediately preceding Webster has represented as utterly heartless and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy and impudent in its brutality.

If the works already discussed were their author’s only claims to remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on the other.  “Antonio and Mellida,” “Old Fortunatus,” or “The Changeling”—­“The Maid’s Tragedy,” “The Duke of Milan,” or “The Traitor”—­would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to outbalance) the merit of the best among these:  the fitful and futile inspiration of “The Devil’s Law-case,” and the stately but subdued inspiration of “Appius and Virginia.”  That his place was with no subordinate poet—­that his station is at Shakespeare’s right hand—­the evidence supplied by his two great tragedies is disputable by no one who has an inkling of the qualities which confer a right to be named in the same day with the greatest writer of all time.

Aeschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness.  “But in any wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness”:  this is the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration and of light.  The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident, than the impression of the doctrine of Aeschylus.  Fate, irreversible and inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we trace the sign, in the upshot of “Othello” or “King Lear.”  The last step into the darkness