which represents John Webster as one whose instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in wrong-doing, into the easy levity and infantile simplicity of spontaneous wickedness which distinguished the moral and social corruption of renascent Italy.  Proof enough of this has already been adduced to make any protestation or appeal against such an estimate as preposterous in its superfluity as the misconception just mentioned is preposterous in its perversity.  The great if not incomparable power displayed in Webster’s delineation of such criminals as Flamineo and Bosola—­Bonapartes in the bud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who have missed their Rubicon and collapse into the likeness of a Catiline—­is a sign rather of his noble English loathing for the traditions associated with such names as Caesar and Medici and Borgia, Catiline and Iscariot and Napoleon, than of any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of historic crime.  Flamineo especially, the ardent pimp, the enthusiastic pandar, who prostitutes his sister and assassinates his brother with such earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own straightforward self-interest, has in him a sublime fervor of rascality which recalls rather the man of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of December and of Sedan.  He has something too of Napoleon’s ruffianly good-humor—­the frankness of a thieves’ kitchen or an imperial court, when the last thin fig-leaf of pretence has been plucked off and crumpled up and flung away.  We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch.  As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp—­more like the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his triumphs.  But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg—­so dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two destinations appropriate for the close of his career—­a gibbet or a throne.

This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster’s latest masterpiece.  Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud.  There is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part of Flamineo:  his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution.  The one is a human snake, the