to Arden of Feversham asks pardon of the “gentlemen” composing its audience for “this naked tragedy,” on the plea that “simple truth is gracious enough” without needless ornament or bedizenment of “glozing stuff.”  Far more appropriate would such an apology have been as in this case was at least superfluous, if appended by way of epilogue to A Warning for Fair Women.  That is indeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths of it are in no wise beyond the reach of an able, industrious, and practised reporter, commissioned by the proprietors of the journal on whose staff he might be engaged to throw into the force of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery and murder.  The one figure on the stage of this author which stands out sharply defined in our recollection against a background of undistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer.  This most discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who might have put to some better profit his shifty spirit of enterprise, his genuine capacity of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood.  His minor confidants and accomplices, Mrs. Drury and her Trusty Roger, are mere commonplace profiles of malefactors:  but it is in the contrast between the portraits of their two criminal heroines that the vast gulf of difference between the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to the sense of all readers.  Anne Sanders and Alice Arden stand as far beyond comparison apart as might a portrait by any average academician and a portrait by Watts or Millais.  Once only, in the simple and noble scene cited by the over-generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow and murderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height of the situation and the dramatic level of the part so unfalteringly sustained from first to last by the wife and the murderess of Arden.

There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinate groups of innocent or guilty characters.  That is an excellent and effective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim’s little boy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; but in Arden of Feversham the number of touches as telling and as striking as this one is practically numberless.  They also show a far stronger and keener faculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination.  The casual encounter of little Sanders with the yet red-handed murderer of his father is not comparable for depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which Arden’s friend Franklin, riding with him to Raynham Down, breaks off his “pretty tale” of a perjured wife, overpowered by a “fighting at his heart,” at the moment when they come close upon the ambushed assassins in Alice Arden’s pay.  But the internal evidence in this case, as I have already intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestion offered by any single passage