reckoned on is the indomitable courage underlying her easily irritable emotions.  Her bearing at the trial for her husband’s murder is as dexterous and dauntless as the demeanor of Mary Stuart before her judges.  To Charles Lamb it seemed “an innocence-resembling boldness”; to Mr. Dyce and Canon Kingsley the innocence displayed in Lamb’s estimate seemed almost ludicrous in its misconception of Webster’s text.  I should hesitate to agree with them that he has never once made his accused heroine speak in the natural key of innocence unjustly impeached:  Mary’s pleading for her life is not at all points incompatible in tone with the innocence which it certainly fails to establish—­except in minds already made up to accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or possibly be advanced on her behalf; and the arguments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant prepossession of her judges, than those put forward by the Queen of Scots.  It is impossible not to wonder whether the poet had not in his mind the actual tragedy which had taken place just twenty-five years before the publication of this play:  if not, the coincidence is something more than singular.  The fierce profligacy and savage egotism of Brachiano have a certain energy and activity in the display and the development of their motives and effects which suggest rather such a character as Bothwell’s than such a character as that of the bloated and stolid sensualist who stands or grovels before us in the historic record of his life.  As presented by Webster, he is doubtless an execrable ruffian:  as presented by history, he would be intolerable by any but such readers or spectators as those on whom the figments or the photographs of self-styled naturalism produce other than emetic emotions.  Here again the noble instinct of the English poet has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an ignoble reality.  This “Brachiano” is a far more living figure than the porcine paramour of the historic Accoramboni.  I am not prepared to maintain that in one scene too much has not been sacrificed to immediate vehemence of effect.  The devotion of the discarded wife, who to shelter her Antony from the vengeance of Octavius assumes the mask of raging jealousy, thus taking upon herself the blame and responsibility of their final separation, is expressed with such consummate and artistic simplicity of power that on a first reading the genius of the dramatist may well blind us to the violent unlikelihood of the action.  But this very extravagance of self-sacrifice may be thought by some to add a crowning touch of pathos to the unsurpassable beauty of the scene in which her child, after the murder of his mother, relates her past sufferings to his uncle.  Those to whom the great name of Webster represents merely an artist in horrors, a ruffian of genius, may be recommended to study every line and syllable of this brief dialogue: 

   Francisco.  How now, my noble cousin? what, in black?