The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note, are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close.  Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers attendant on the dead.

The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo.  Pure and simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano:  a savage melancholy inflames the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or redemption.  There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic humor in all Webster’s writings than that conveyed in the scornful and acute reply—­almost too acute perhaps for the character—­of Bosola’s remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty:  “Thy pity is nothing akin to thee.”  He has more in common with Romelio in “The Devil’s Law-case,” an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and stumbles into vacuity:  and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emasculated copy from it.  But to him too Webster has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such sudden snatches of funereal verse as this: 

   How then can any monument say
   “Here rest these bones till the last day,”
   When Time, swift both of foot and feather,
   May bear them the sexton kens not whither? 
   What care I, then, though my last sleep
   Be in the desert or the deep,
   No lamp nor taper, day and night,
   To give my charnel chargeable light? 
   I have there like quantity of ground,
   And at the last day I shall be found.

The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is perceptible here and there in “The Duchess of Malfy,” but comes to its head in “The Devil’s Law-case.”  It cannot, I fear, be denied that Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre “whose service is perfect freedom”—­as Shakespeare found it, and combined with perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and sublime