But if “A Game at Chess” is especially distinguished by its complete and thorough harmony of execution and design, the lack of any such artistic merit in another famous work of Middleton’s is such as once more to excite that irritating sense of inequality, irregularity, inconstancy of genius and inconsequence of aim, which too often besets and bewilders the student of our early dramatists.  There is poetry enough in “The Witch” to furnish forth a whole generation of poeticules:  but the construction or composition of the play, the arrangement and evolution of event, the distinction or development of character, would do less than little credit to a boy of twelve; who at any rate would hardly have thought of patching up so ridiculous a reconciliation between intending murderers and intended victims as here exceeds in absurdity the chaotic combination of accident and error which disposes of inconvenient or superfluous underlings.  But though neither Mr. Dyce nor Mr. Bullen has been at all excessive or unjust in his animadversions on these flagrant faults and follies, neither editor has given his author due credit for the excellence of style, of language and versification, which makes this play readable throughout with pleasure, if not always without impatience.  Fletcher himself, the acknowledged master of the style here adopted by Middleton, has left no finer example of metrical fluency and melodious ease.  The fashion of dialogue and composition is no doubt rather feminine than masculine:  Marlowe and Jonson, Webster and Beaumont, Tourneur and Ford—­to cite none but the greatest of authorities in this kind—­wrote a firmer if not a freer hand, struck a graver if not a sweeter note of verse:  this rapid effluence of easy expression is liable to lapse into conventional efflux of facile improvisation:  but such command of it as Middleton’s is impossible to any but a genuine and a memorable poet.

As for the supposed obligations of Shakespeare to Middleton or Middleton to Shakespeare, the imaginary relations of “The Witch” to “Macbeth” or “Macbeth” to “The Witch,” I can only say that the investigation of this subject seems to me as profitable as a research into the natural history of snakes in Iceland.  That the editors to whom we owe the miserably defaced and villanously garbled text which is all that has reached us of “Macbeth,” not content with the mutilation of the greater poet, had recourse to the interpolation of a few superfluous and incongruous lines or fragments from the lyric portions of the lesser poet’s work—­that the players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers who plundered Middleton—­must be obvious to all but those (if any such yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing the unspeakably impudent assertion of those mendacious malefactors that they have left us a pure and perfect edition of Shakespeare.  These passages are all thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of the lesser work:  it would be tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping with the general tone of the other.  But in their own way nothing can be finer:  they have a tragic liveliness in ghastliness, a grotesque animation of horror, which no other poet has ever conceived or conveyed to us.  The difference between Michael Angelo and Goya, Tintoretto and Gustave Dore, does not quite efface the right of the minor artists to existence and remembrance.