To find them out that murdered my son? [_Exeunt._

(2)

[HIERONIMO, _recovering his mental balance, perceives that_ BAZULTO
_is not his son._]

Ay, now I know thee, now thou nam'st thy son:
Thou art the lively image of my grief;
Within thy face my sorrows I may see:
Thy eyes are gumm'd with tears, thy cheeks are wan,
Thy forehead troubled, and thy muttering lips
Murmur sad words abruptly broken off;
By force of windy sighs thy spirit breathes;
And all this sorrow riseth for thy son.
And selfsame sorrow feel I for my son.
Come in, old man, thou shalt to Isabel;
Lean on my arm; I thee, thou me, shalt stay;
And thou and I, and she, will sing a song,
Three parts in one, but all of discords fram'd.--
Talk not of chords, but let us now be gone,
For with a cord Horatio was slain.

_Soliman and Perseda_ invites little further attention than that which
one scene and one character alone demand. Its sharp descent from the
tremendous force of _The Spanish Tragedy_ is, however, slightly redeemed
by the poetic warmth of its love passages. Love is the motive of the
plot. Apart from that it sins unforgivably against probability, good
taste, reason, and justice. Its reckless distribution of death is such
that every one of the fourteen named characters come to a violent end,
besides numerous nameless wretches referred to generically as witnesses
or executioners. Nor is any attempt made to show just cause for their
destruction. We could almost deny that the author of the previous
tragedy had any hand in this play, did we not know, on the authority of
his own signature, that the same author thought it worth his labour to
translate _Cornelie_ for the English stage. The fact was that dramatists
had not yet the courage always to place their own artistic inclinations
above the need of gratifying an unformed public taste, so that the same
man may be found composing plays of widely differing natures for,
presumably, different audiences.

The single character deserving mention is the boastful knight,
Basilisco, whose incredible vaunts and invariable preference for the
very freest of blank verse, in a play almost entirely exempt from
either, read like an intentional burlesque of _Tamburlaine_. If so, and
the suggestion is not ill-founded or improbable, it may be interpreted
as an emphatic rejection of the influence of Marlowe and as a claim, on
Kyd's part, to sole