ut implacable cruelty, violent death received with
agonized protest, or at best as the only release from unmitigated misery
with which the wretch has become familiar,

As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar.

Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of heavenly justice,
of the fatality hanging over a house which will be broken when guilt
shall have been expiated, which lends a sort of serene background of
eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and Argos. There is for
these men no fatality save the evil nature of man, no justice save the
doubling of crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for Webster
and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no heaven above, wrathful but
placable; there are no Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but
this blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-burnt and
death-hungering men, felling each other down and trampling on one
another blindly in the eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world
of these great poets is not the open world with its light and its air,
its purifying storms and lightnings: it is the darkened Italian palace,
with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets
muffling the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trapdoors; its
arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned
flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the
wretch is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below, in the
cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in
the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a
cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of the victim.

II.

Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it in the works of our
tragic playwrights: a country of mysterious horror, the sinister
reputation of which lasted two hundred years; lasted triumphantly
throughout the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found its
latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances of the school of Ann
Radcliff, romances which are but the last puny and grotesque descendants
of the great stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first
terror-stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with the Italy of
the late Renaissance. Is the impression received by the Elizabethan
playwrights a correct impression? Was Italy in the sixteenth century
that land of horrors? Reviewing in our memory the literature and art of
the Italian Renaissance, r