ting in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberately
terror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination shows
itself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work of
any other artist, it would inevitably mar the harmony of the picture.
A lady, to select one instance, encourages her lover to embrace her at
the moment of his happiness. She cries:

Sir, be confident!
What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir;
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster,
Kneels at my husband's tomb.

Yet so sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do not
feel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to use
one of his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like a
presentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its
conclusion, gather and darken on the wretched victims of his bloody
plot.

It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct,
that Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, 'The White
Devil' and 'The Duchess of Malfi,' in Italian annals. Whether he had
visited Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing is
known about Webster's life. But that he had gazed long and earnestly
into the mirror held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age,
is certain. Aghast and fascinated by the sins he saw there flaunting
in the light of day--sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene,
and Howell have insisted with impressive vehemence--Webster discerned
in them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing from
that contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speak
of horrors.' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of
the Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He found
there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he
alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial
narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence
which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in
them.

The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty,
adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of
vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical
scepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in
the midst of her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star'
before the nations; these were the very elements in which the genius