could hardly fail to be in general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical inference which would argue that because some wit is dirty all dirt must be witty—­because humor may sometimes be indecent, indecency must always be humorous.  “The clartier the cosier” was an old proverb among the northern peasantry while yet recalcitrant against the inroads of sanitary reform:  “the dirtier the droller” would seem to have been practically the no less irrational motto of many not otherwise unadmirable comic writers.  It does happen that the drollest character in all Marston’s plays is also the most offensive in his language—­“the foulest-mouthed profane railing brother”; but the drollest passages in the whole part are those that least want washing.  How far the example of Ben Jonson may have influenced or encouraged Marston in the indulgence of this unlovely propensity can only be conjectured; it is certain that no third writer of the time, however given to levity of speech or audacity in the selection of a subject, was so prone—­in Shakespeare’s phrase—­to “talk greasily” as the authors of “Bartholomew Fair” and “The Dutch Courtesan.”

In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the interest is perhaps, on the whole, rather better sustained than in “The Wonder of Women.”  The prologue to “Antonio’s Revenge” (the second part of the “Historie of Antonio and Mellida”) has enjoyed the double correlative honor of ardent appreciation by Lamb and responsive depreciation by Gifford.  Its eccentricities and perversities of phrase[1] may be no less noticeable, but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony.  Strange, wayward and savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and such dispraise.  The youngest student of Lamb’s “Specimens” can hardly fail to recognize this when he compares the vivid and piercing description of the death of Mellida with the fearful and supernatural impression of the scene which brings or thrusts before us the immolation of the child, her brother.

[Footnote 1:  One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a palpable misprint—­ramps for cramps.]

The labored eccentricity of style which signalizes and disfigures the three chief tragedies or tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational choice of expression in his less ambitious and less unequal works.  It is almost impossible to imagine any insertion or addition from the hand of Webster which would not be at once obvious to any reader in the text of “Sophonisba” or in either part of “Antonio and Mellida.”