e historical play of "Sir Thomas Wyatt" can
only be fitly described by using the favorite word in which Ben Jonson
was wont to condense his critical opinions,--"It is naught." But "The
White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" are tragedies which even so rich
and varied a literature as the English could not lose without a sensible
diminution of its treasures.

Webster was one of those writers whose genius consists in the expression
of special moods, and who, outside of those moods, cannot force their
creative faculties into vigorous action. His mind by instinctive
sentiment was directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of
life. He brooded over crime and misery until his imagination was
enveloped in their atmosphere, found a fearful joy in probing their
sources and tracing their consequences, became strangely familiar with
their physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering sympathy with
their "deep groans and terrible ghastly looks." There was hardly a
remote corner of the soul, which hid a feeling capable of giving mental
pain, into which this artist in agony had not curiously peered; and his
meditations on the mysterious disorder produced in the human
consciousness by the rebound of thoughtless or criminal deeds might have
found fit expression in the lines of the great poet of our own times:--

"Action is momentary,--
The motion of a muscle, this way or that.
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite."

With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's power as a dramatist
consists in confining the domain of his tragedy within definite limits,
in excluding all variety of incident and character which could interfere
with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and in the intensity
with which he arrests, and the tenacity with which he holds the
attention, as he drags the mind along the pathway which begins in
misfortune or guilt, and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his
stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime on crime, with
such fatal facility, that he would render the mind callous to his
terrors, were it not that what is acted is still less than what is
suggested, and that the souls of his characters are greater than their
sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The crimes and the
criminals belong to Italy as it was in the sixteenth century, when
poisoning and assassination were almost in the fashion; the feelings
with which they are regard