must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the
_Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to
her maddened husband is merely doglike,--though not even, in the
exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "most
passionately patient." There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure
to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find
its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to
lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively
masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--or
one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she
is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less
of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert
Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is
the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy,
labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its central
situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend of
Florence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most
graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that
somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of
painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made
credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of
Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid
little play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. It
is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for
pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging
rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes
our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though
a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is
not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and
Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less
plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them
left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion
is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I
cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis
a very excellent piece of work"; ma