nce more
deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and
implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race
of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found
expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of
Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness
and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his
fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came
to seem to him the "damned race," the hopeless horde of millions "mostly
fools" too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the
laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his
biographer. On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry
were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of
his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he
can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable
amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the
text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the
impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more
than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less
transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of
"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": whereas it is hardly too much to say that
the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur's moral rhetoric is no less
unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent ineptitude of Byron's.

It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the popes,
"I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile";
therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers
who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and
self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my
work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts
from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and
egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to
attribute to him are rather the outer garments than the inner qualities
of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and nobler
characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all
due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the
murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork o