ew indeed outside the
pale of the very greatest who can display at will their natural genius
in the keenest concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. But
among these fewer than few stands the author of "The Revenger's
Tragedy." The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza
would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample,
that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but
simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no
satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and
impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxurious and sardonic,
cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and
rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring
self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived
could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more passionate
reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue that
follows them:

_Mother_. Troth, he says true.

_Castiza_. False: I defy you both:
I have endured you with an ear of fire:
Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face.
Mother, come from that poisonous woman there.

_Mother_. Where?

_Castiza_. Do you not see her? she's too inward then.

I could not count the lines which on reperusal of this great tragic poem
I find apt for illustrative quotation, or suggestive of a tributary
comment: but enough has already been cited to prove beyond all chance of
cavil from any student worthy of the name that the place of Cyril
Tourneur is not among minor poets, nor his genius of such a temper as
naturally to attract the sympathy or arouse the enthusiasm of their
admirers; that among the comrades or the disciples who to us may appear
but as retainers or satellites of Shakespeare his rank is high and his
credentials to that rank are clear. That an edition more carefully
revised and annotated, with a text reduced to something more of
coherence and intelligible arrangement, than has yet been vouchsafed to
us, would suffice to place his name among theirs of whose eminence the
very humblest of their educated countrymen are ashamed to seem ignorant,
it would probably be presumptuous to assert. But if the noblest ardor of
moral emotion, the most fervent passion of eager and indignant sympathy
with all that is best and abhorrence of all that is worst in women or in
men--if the most