Sir, be confident! 
  What is’t distracts you?  This is flesh and blood, sir;
  ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster,
  Kneels at my husband’s tomb.

Yet so sustained is Webster’s symphony of sombre tints, that we do not feel this sepulchral language, this ‘talk fit for a charnel’ (to use one of his own phrases), to be out of keeping.  It sounds like a presentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its conclusion, gather and darken on the wretched victims of his bloody plot.

It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct, that Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, ’The White Devil’ and ‘The Duchess of Malfi,’ in Italian annals.  Whether he had visited Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing is known about Webster’s life.  But that he had gazed long and earnestly into the mirror held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age, is certain.  Aghast and fascinated by the sins he saw there flaunting in the light of day—­sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene, and Howell have insisted with impressive vehemence—­Webster discerned in them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art.  Withdrawing from that contemplation, he was like a spirit ’loosed out of hell to speak of horrors.’  Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of the Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime.  He found there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret.  From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in them.

The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty, adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical scepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in the midst of her refinement blaze like ‘a bright and ominous star’ before the nations; these were the very elements in which the genius of Webster—­salamander-like in flame—­could live and flourish.  Only the incidents of Italian history, or of French history in its Italianated epoch, were capable of supplying him with the proper type of plot.  It was in Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such as England for a brief space in the reign of the first Stuart threatened to become, that the well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his characters might have been realised.  An audience familiar with Italian novels through Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the Reformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See, outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes of Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgias and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which had conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated