Another stroke well worthy of Shakespeare is the redeeming touch of grace in this brutal and cold-blooded ruffian which gives him in his agony a thought of tender care for the accomplice of his atrocities: 

   Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee.

Few instances of Webster’s genius are so well known as the brief but magnificent passage which follows; yet it may not be impertinent to cite it once again: 

Brachiano.  O thou soft natural death, that art joint twin To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corpse, Whilst horror waits on princes.

   Vittoria.  I am lost forever.

   Brachiano.  How miserable a thing it is to die
   ’Mongst women howling!—­What are those?

   Flamineo.  Franciscans: 
   They have brought the extreme unction.

   Brachiano.  On pain of death, let no man name death to me;
   It is a word [? most] infinitely terrible.

The very tremor of moral and physical abjection from nervous defiance into prostrate fear which seems to pant and bluster and quail and subside in the natural cadence of these lines would suffice to prove the greatness of the artist who could express it with such terrible perfection:  but when we compare it, by collation of the two scenes, with the deep simplicity of tenderness, the child-like accuracy of innocent emotion, in the passage previously cited, it seems to me that we must admit, as an unquestionable truth, that in the deepest and highest and purest qualities of tragic poetry Webster stands nearer to Shakespeare than any other English poet stands to Webster; and so much nearer as to be a good second; while it is at least questionable whether even Shelley can reasonably be accepted as a good third.  Not one among the predecessors, contemporaries, or successors of Shakespeare and Webster has given proof of this double faculty—­this coequal mastery of terror and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, but vivified and glorified, by the splendor of immediate and infallible imagination.  The most grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent in stupidity as to pretend an aim at more perfect presentation of truth; the most fervent fancy, the most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a desire for more exquisite expression of natural passion in a form of utterance more naturally exalted and refined.

In all the vast and voluminous records of critical error there can be discovered no falsehood more foolish or more flagrant than the vulgar tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the “violent delights” of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile misapprehension than that