Sophonisba.  No; free.

   Massinissa.  How then keep I my faith?

   Sophonisba.  My death
   Gives help to all.  From Rome so rest we free: 
   So brought to Scipio, faith is kept in thee.

   Massinissa.  Thou darest not die!—­Some wine.—­Thou
   darest not die!

Sophonisba.  How near was I unto the curse of man, Joy!  How like was I yet once to have been glad!  He that ne’er laughed may with a constant face Contemn Jove’s frown.  Happiness makes us base.

[Footnote 1:  This verse, unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the poet’s Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irrational and inexplicable one than the intrusion of some villanously bad Italian lines and phrases into the text of “Antonio and Mellida.”]

[Footnote 2:  In other words—­intolerable or unimaginable division or divulsion of mind and spirit between two contending calls of honor, two irreconcilable claims of duty.  Modern editors of this great scene have broken up the line into pieces, marked or divided by superfluous dashes and points of exclamation.  Campbell, who had the good taste to confute his own depreciatory criticism of Marston by including the passage among his “Selections,” was the first, as far as I know, to adopt this erroneous and rather spasmodic punctuation.]

The man or the boy does not seem to me enviable who can read or remember these verses without a thrill.  In sheer force of concision they recall the manner of Alfieri; but that noble tragic writer could hardly have put such fervor of austere passion into the rigid utterance, or touched the note of emotion with such a glowing depth of rapture.  That “bitter and severe delight”—­if I may borrow the superb phrase of Landor—­which inspires and sustains the imperial pride of self-immolation might have found in his dramatic dialect an expression as terse and as sincere:  it could hardly have clothed itself with such majestic and radiant solemnity of living and breathing verse.  The rapid elliptic method of amoebaean dialogue is more in his manner than in any English poet’s known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists.  His highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri’s, a note of self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its nastiness.  Dirt for dirt’s sake has never been the apparent aim of any great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of disease—­some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne.  A poet of so high an order as the author of “Sophonisba”