power of self-abstraction from the individual
self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal wrong, this
contemptuous yet passionate scrutiny of the very emotions which rend
the heart and inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of the
thinker, is the special seal or sign of original inspiration which
distinguishes the type most representative of Tourneur's genius, most
significant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force. Such a
conception, clothed in mere prose or in merely passable verse, would be
proof sufficient of the mental power which conceived it; when expressed
in such verse as follows, it proves at once and preserves forever the
claim of the designer to a place among the immortals:

Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love,
My study's ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally filled out
These ragged imperfections;
When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set
In these unsightly rings;--then 'twas a face
So far beyond the artificial shine
Of any woman's bought complexion
That the uprightest man (if such there be,
That sin but seven times a day) broke custom
And made up eight with looking after her.

The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce and savage pathos in the
note of it; a cadence which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter as
utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weeping and wailing, for
curses or for prayers, than anything in dramatic poetry outside the
part of Hamlet. It would be a conjecture not less plausible than futile,
though perhaps not less futile than plausible, which should suggest that
the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet may be responsible for the
creation of Tourneur's Vindice, and the influence of Tourneur's Vindice
for the creation of Shakespeare's Timon. It is a certainty indisputable
except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only
poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur
can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William
Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike
the general style of either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the
parallel" between Tourneur and Marston, "as far as it goes, is so
obvious that it is not worth drawing," it is no less certain that the
diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which
created Vindice is at lea