e speaks the dialect of
despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.
To move a horror skilfully, 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. Inferior geniuses may "upon
horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They
mistake quantity for quality; they "terrify babes with painted
devils;" but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors
want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

_The White Devil_, _or Vittoria Corombona_.--This White Devil of
Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an
innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless
beauty of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and
are ready to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very
judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators,
and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her, in spite
of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don
Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela,
"without making any profit of her manifest resolution made there in
their hearing."

"So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Does spot the beauty of her budding name!"

I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for the
death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his
drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so
this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling,
which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that
there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would
authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to
Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I
thought that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed full of
that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in
the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty
criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking
distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set
inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating
conversation in