se 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 or by any number of single passages. The
first and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence
of character. A good deal might be said on the score of style in