wait in death:
My sovereign as his liegeman; on my mistress
As a devoted servant; and on Ithocles
As if no brave, yet no unworthy enemy:
Nor did I use an engine to entrap
His life out of a slavish fear to combat
Youth, strength, or cunning; but for that I durst not
Engage the goodness of a cause on fortune
By which his name might have outfaced my vengeance.
Oh, Tecnicus, inspired with Phoebus' fire!
I call to mind thy augury, 'twas perfect;
_Revenge proves its own executioner._
When feeble man is lending to his mother
The dust he was first framed in, thus he totters.

_Bass._ Life's fountain is dried up.

_Org._ So falls the standard
Of my prerogative in being a creature,
A mist hangs o'er mine eyes, the sun's bright splendour
Is clouded in an everlasting shadow.
Welcome, thou ice that sit'st about my heart,
No heat can ever thaw thee.

[_Dies._

The perverse absurdity of a man like Orgilus letting Penthea die by the
most horrible of deaths must be set aside: his vengeance (the primary
absurdity granted), is exactly and wholly in character. But if anything
could be decisive against Ford being "of the first order of poets," even of
dramatic poets, it would be the total lack of interest in the characters of
Calantha and Ithocles. Fate-disappointed love seems (no doubt from
something in his own history) to have had a singular attraction for Lamb;
and the glorification, or, as it were, apotheosis of it in Calantha must
have appealed to him in one of those curious and illegitimate ways which
every critic knows. But the mere introduction of Bassanes would show that
Ford is not of the first order of poets. He is a purely contemptible
character, neither sublimed by passion of jealousy, nor kept whole by salt
of comic exposition; a mischievous poisonous idiot who ought to have had
his brains knocked out, and whose brains would assuredly have been knocked
out, by any Orgilus of real life. He is absolutely unequal to the place of
central personage, and causer of the harms, of a romantic tragedy such as
_The Broken Heart_.

I have said "by any Orgilus of real life," but Ford has little to do with
real life; and it is in this fact that the insufficiency of his claim to
rank among the