and infected his nobler sympathies with some taint
of contagious egotism and pessimistic obduracy of imagination. And the
intensity of sympathy with which this crowning creation of the poet's
severe and fiery genius is steadily developed and displayed should make
any critic of reasonable modesty think more than twice or thrice before
he assumes or admits the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an
error or so grave a defect in the conception of so great an artist. For
if the claim to such a title might be disputed in the case of a claimant
who could show no better credentials than his authorship of "The
Atheist's Tragedy"--and even in that far from faultless work of genius
there are manifest and manifold signs, not merely of excellence, but of
greatness--the claim of the man who could write "The Revenger's Tragedy"
is questionable by no one who has any glimmering of insight or
perception as to what qualities they are which confer upon a writer the
indisputable title to a seat in the upper house of poets.

This master work of Cyril Tourneur, the most perfect and most terrible
incarnation of the idea of retribution impersonate and concentrated
revenge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic poet or the vigils of a
future tyrannicide, is resumed and embodied in a figure as original and
as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever felt the savage
fascination of its presence, as any of the humaner figures evoked and
immortalized by Shakespeare. The rage of Swift, without his insanity and
impurity, seems to utter in every word the healthier if no less
consuming passion of a heart lacerated by indignation and envenomed by
contempt as absolute, as relentless, and as inconsolable as his own. And
in the very torrent of the man's meditative and solitary passion, a very
Phlegethon of agony and fury and ravenous hunger after the achievement
of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves
as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and
reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no
plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery
sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to
scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of
his murdered mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections on the
influence of her living beauty as would beseem a sexless and malignant
satirist of her sex. This