of Webster--salamander-like in flame--could live and flourish. Only
the incidents of Italian history, or of French history in its
Italianated epoch, were capable of supplying him with the proper type
of plot. It was in Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such as
England for a brief space in the reign of the first Stuart threatened
to become, that the well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his characters
might have been realised. An audience familiar with Italian novels
through Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the
Reformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See,
outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes of
Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgias
and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which had
conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated by
that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such an
audience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertook
to lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramatic
action. But, as the old proverb puts it, 'Inglese Italianato e un
diavolo incarnato.' 'An Englishman assuming the Italian habit is a
devil in the flesh.' The Italians were depraved, but spiritually
feeble. The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage,
arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour
of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. To
the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy,
meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened the
complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian
character of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was
complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a
Florentine or a Neapolitan. He had not grasped the meaning of the
Machiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement from
the dread of moral consequence. Not only are his villains stealthy,
frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they brood
upon their crimes and analyse their motives. In the midst of their
audacity they are dogged by dread of coming retribution. At the crisis
of their destiny they look back upon their better days with
intellectual remorse. In the execution of their bloodiest schemes they
groan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and quake before the
phantoms of their haunted brains.

T