There is a depth of severe sense in them, a height of heroic scorn, or a dignity of quiet cynicism, which can scarcely be paralleled in the bitterest or the fiercest effusions of John Marston or Cyril Tourneur or Jonathan Swift.  Nay, were they not put into the mouth of a criminal cynic, they would not seem unworthy of Epictetus.  There is nothing so grand in the part of Edmund; the one figure in Shakespeare whose aim in life, whose centre of character, is one with the view or the instinct of Webster’s two typical villains.  Some touches in the part of Flamineo suggest, if not a conscious imitation, an unconscious reminiscence of that prototype:  but the essential and radical originality of Webster’s genius is shown in the difference of accent with which the same savage and sarcastic philosophy of self-interest finds expression through the snarl and sneer of his ambitious cynic.  Monsters as they may seem of unnatural egotism and unallayed ferocity, the one who dies penitent, though his repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as any ever wrought by miraculous conversion, dies as thoroughly in character as the one who takes leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony which hardly passes off at last into a mood of mocking and triumphant resignation.  There is a cross of heroism in almost all Webster’s characters which preserves the worst of them from such hatefulness as disgusts us in certain of Fletcher’s or of Ford’s:  they have in them some salt of manhood, some savor of venturesome and humorous resolution, which reminds us of the heroic age in which the genius that begot them was born and reared—­the age of Richard Grenville and Francis Drake, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

The earliest play of Webster’s now surviving—­if a work so piteously mutilated and defaced can properly be said to survive—­is a curious example of the combined freedom and realism with which recent or even contemporary history was habitually treated on the stage during the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.  The noblest poem known to me of this peculiar kind is the play of “Sir Thomas More,” first printed by Mr. Dyce in 1844 for the Shakespeare Society:  the worst must almost certainly be that “Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell” which the infallible verdict of German intuition has discovered to be “not only unquestionably Shakespeare’s, but worthy to be classed among his best and maturest works.”  About midway between these two I should be inclined to rank “The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” a mangled and deformed abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey.  In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took decidedly the greater part.  The shambling and slipshod metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of simple and exquisite melody—­the lazy vivacity and impulsive