aught I know—­beneath Webster, if I venture to indicate the superiority in truth of natural passion—­and, I must add, of moral instinct—­which distinguishes the modern from the ancient.  It is not, it never will be, and it never can have been natural for noble and civilized creatures to accept with spontaneous complacency, to discharge with unforced equanimity, such offices or such duties as weigh so lightly on the spirit of the Sophoclean Orestes that the slaughter of a mother seems to be a less serious undertaking for his unreluctant hand than the subsequent execution of her paramour.  The immeasurable superiority of Aeschylus to his successors in this quality of instinctive righteousness—­if a word long vulgarized by theology may yet be used in its just and natural sense—­is shared no less by Webster than by Shakespeare.  The grave and deep truth of natural impulse is never ignored by these poets when dealing either with innocent or with criminal passion:  but it surely is now and then ignored by the artistic quietism of Sophocles—­as surely as it is outraged and degraded by the vulgar theatricalities of Euripides.  Thomas Campbell was amused and scandalized by the fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it) modestly compares himself to the playwright last mentioned; being apparently of opinion that “Hippolytus” and “Medea” may be reckoned equal or superior, as works of tragic art or examples of ethical elevation, to “The White Devil” and “The Duchess of Malfy”; and being no less apparently ignorant, and incapable of understanding, that as there is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in the moral sense than Euripides:  while as a dramatic artist—­an artist in character, action, and emotion—­the degenerate tragedian of Athens, compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated monkey to a well-made man.  No better test of critical faculty could be required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than is afforded by the critic’s professed or professional estimate of those great poets whose names are not consecrated—­or desecrated—­by the conventional applause, the factitious adoration, of a tribunal whose judgments are dictated by obsequious superstition and unanimous incompetence.  When certain critics inform a listening world that they do not admire Marlowe and Webster—­they admire Shakespeare and Milton, we know at once that it is not the genius of Shakespeare—­it is the reputation of Shakespeare that they admire.  It is not the man that they bow down to:  it is the bust that they crouch down before.  They would worship Shirley as soon as Shakespeare—­Glover as soon as Milton—­Byron as soon as Shelley—­Ponsard as soon as Hugo—­Longfellow as soon as Tennyson—­if the tablet were as showily emblazoned, the inscription as pretentiously engraved.