f merit. These are
_The Duchess of Malfi_, _The White Devil_, _The Devil's Law Case_, and
_Appius and Virginia_.

Of _Appius and Virginia_ the best thing to be said is to borrow
Sainte-Beuve's happy description of Moliere's _Don Garcie de Navarre_, and
to call it an _essai pale et noble_. Webster is sometimes very close to
Shakespere; but to read _Appius and Virginia_, and then to read _Julius
Caesar_ or _Coriolanus_, is to appreciate, in perhaps the most striking way
possible, the universality which all good judges from Dryden downwards have
recognised in the prince of literature. Webster, though he was evidently a
good scholar, and even makes some parade of scholarship, was a Romantic to
the core, and was all abroad in these classical measures. _The Devil's Law
Case_ sins in the opposite way, being hopelessly undigested, destitute of
any central interest, and, despite fine passages, a mere "salmagundi."
There remain the two famous plays of _The White Devil_ or _Vittoria
Corombona_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_--plays which were rarely, if ever,
acted after their author's days, and of which the earlier and, to my
judgment, better was not a success even then, but which the judgment of
three generations has placed at the very head of all their class, and which
contain magnificent poetry.

I have said that in my judgment _The White Devil_ is the better of the two;
I shall add that it seems to me very far the better. Webster's plays are
comparatively well known, and there is no space here to tell their rather
intricate arguments. It need only be said that the contrast of the two is
striking and unmistakable; and that Webster evidently meant in the one to
indicate the punishment of female vice, in the other to draw pity and
terror by the exhibition of the unprevented but not unavenged sufferings of
female virtue. Certainly both are excellent subjects, and if the latter
seem the harder, we have Imogen and Bellafront to show, in the most diverse
material, and with the most diverse setting possible, how genius can manage
it. With regard to _The White Devil_, it has been suggested with some
plausibility that it wants expansion. Certainly the action is rather
crowded, and the recourse to dumb show (which, however, Webster again
permitted himself in _The Duchess_) looks like a kind of shorthand
indication of scenes that might have been worked out. Even as it is,
however, the sequence of events is intelligible, and the presentation o