senting the bloods and men of wit and pleasure about town, which inhabit most of the comedies of the time, there is still a sharpness and quickness of 'movement which carries the mind swiftly through the mud into a better region. Decker has, strictly speaking, no morality; for nothing in his works seems to depend on will or principle, but to spring from instinctive sentiments; and when these are delicate or noble he is among the purest of writers. His sweetness and humanity are exquisitely fine. Thus, one passage in his celebrated lines on Patience has become almost world-renowned.

"Patience, my lord, why, 't is the soul of peace;
Of all the virtues, 't is nearest kin to heaven;
It makes men look like gods. The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

In the same spirit is his dialogue between the Christian lady and the angel, in The Virgin Martyr, a tragedy written in connection with Massinger. The refinement of the feeling is almost unmatched by any dramatist under Shakspeare. Dorothea is attended by an angel, disguised as a page, - a "smooth-faced, glorious thing," a thousand blessings "dancing upon his eyes."

"ANGELO. DOROTHEA. The time, midnight.

"Dor. My book and taper.

"Ang. Here, most holy mistress.

"Dor. Thy voice sends forth such music, that I never

Was ravished with a more celestial sound.

Were every servant in the world like thee,

So full of goodness, angels would come down

To dwell with us: thy name is Angelo,
And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest;
Thy youth with too much watching is opprest

"Ang. No, my dear lady. I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
By my late watching, but to wait on you.
When at your prayers you kneel before the altar,
Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven,
So blest I hold me in your company.

Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid
Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence:
For then you break his heart.

"Dor. Be nigh me still, then.

In golden letters down I'll set that day
Which gave thee to me.
Little did I hope
To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself,
This little, pretty body, when I, coming
Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy,
My sweet-faced, godly beggar-boy, crave an alms,
Which with glad hand I gave, with lucky hand;
And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom
Methought was filled with no hot wanton fire,
But with a holy flame, mounting since higher,
On wings of cherubims, than it did before.

'Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye So likes so poor a servant.

"Dor. I have offered

Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents.
I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some,
To dwell with thy good father; for, the son
Bewitching me so deeply with his presence,
He that begot him must do 't ten times more.
I pray thee, my sweet boy, show me thy parents;
Be not ashamed.

"Ang. I am not : I did never

Know who my mother was; but, by yon palace

Filled with bright heavenly courtiers, I dare assure you,
And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand,
My father is in heaven; and, pretty mistress,
If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand
No worse than yet it doth, upon my life,
You and I both shall meet my father there,
And he shall bid you welcome.

"Dor. A blessed day!"

Decker's brain was fertile in fine imaginations and choice bits of wisdom, expressed with great directness and point. We give a few specimens.

"See, from the windows

Of every eye Derision thrusts out cheeks
Wrinkled with idiot laughter; every finger
Is like a dart shot from the hand of Scorn."

"The frosty hand of age now nips your blood,
And strews her snowy flowers upon your head,
And gives you warning that within few years
Death needs must marry you; those short minutes,
That dribble out your life, must needs be spent
In peace, not travail."

Beauty is as a painting; and long life
Is a long journey in December gone,

Tedious, and full of tribulation."

"Though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,

There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors."

"An oath! why 't is the traffic of the soul,
The law within a man; the seal of faith;
The bond of every conscience; unto whom
We set our thoughts like hands."

The Duchess of Malfy, and The White Devil, by JOHN WEBSTER, are among the grandest tragic productions of Shakspeare's contemporaries. They are full of "deep groans and terrible ghastly looks." "To move a horror skilfully," says Lamb, "to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, - this only a Webster can do." Few dramatists, indeed, equal him in the steadiness with which he gazes into the

awful depths of passion, and the stern nerve with which he portrays the dusky and terrible shapes which flit vaguely in its dark abysses. Souls black with guilt, or burdened with misery, or ghastly with fear, he probes to their innermost recesses, and both dissects and represents. His mind had the sense of the supernatural in large measure, and it gives to many of his scenes a dim and fearful grandeur, which affects the soul like a shadow cast from another world. He forces the most conventional of his characters into situations which lay open the very constitution of their natures, and thus compels them to act from the primitive springs of feeling and passion. He begins with duke and duchess; he ends with man and woman. The idea of death asserts itself more strongly in his writings than in those of his contemporaries. In The White Devil, the poisoned Brachiano exclaims,

"On pain of death, let no man name death to me:

It is a word most infinitely terrible."

"in

No person could have written the last line without having brooded deeply over the mystery of the grave. It belongs to that" wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us" in Webster. He fully realized, in relation to tragic effect, that present fears are less than "horrible imaginings." With this sombre and unearthly hue tinging his mind, he is still not deficient in touches of simple nature, wrought out with exquisite art and knowledge, and producing effects the most pathetic or sublime. The death-scene of the Duchess of Malfy is a grand example. This proud, high-hearted woman is persecuted by her two brothers with a strange accumulation of horrors, designed, with a devilish ingenuity,

gradually to break her heart and madden her brain. Lamb very truly remarks," She speaks the dialect of despair, her tongue has a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.

What are Luke's iron crown,' the brazen bull of Perillus, Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees!"

Vittoria Corombona, the White Devil, is a great bad character, "fair as the leprosy, dazzling as the lightning." Her conduct at her arraignment is the perfection of guilt in all its defying impudence. We have no space for extracts. Webster seems to have imitated the spirit of Shakspeare more directly than any of his brother dramatists. In the preface to this play he has a curious reference to his master, alluding to the "right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspeare, Master Decker, and Master Heywood."

Marston, Heywood, Chapman, and Middleton, are stirring names of this era. JOHN MARSTON is a bitter satirist of crime and folly, and often probes the heart to its core in his dark thrusts at evil. He shows a large acquaintance with the baseness and depravity of men, and exposes them mercilessly. His mind was strong, keen, and daring, with hot and impatient impulses, controlled by a stern will, and condensed into scorn. seems to have borne somewhat the same relation to his contemporaries that Hazlitt did to the authors of our time. He quarrelled and fought with many of them, in metrical battles. In one of the satires of the time, he is termed a "ruffian in his style," one who

"Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoe'er he meets ;"

He