suddenly snatch at the middle of the inside, if it be taffeta at the least; and so by that means your costly lining is bewrayed, or else by the pretty advantage of compliment. But one note by the way do I especially woo you to, the neglect of which makes many of our gallants cheap and ordinary, that by no means you be seen above four turns; but in the fifth make yourself away, either in some of the seamsters' shops, the new tobacco-office, or amongst the booksellers, where, if you cannot read, exercise your smoke, and inquire who has writ against this divine weed, &c.5 For this withdrawing yourself a little will much benefit your suit, which else, by too long walking, would be stale to the whole spectators; but howsoever, if Paul's jacks 6 be once up with their elbows, and quarrelling to strike eleven, as soon as ever the clock has parted them, and ended the fray with his hammer, let not the Duke's gallery contain you any longer, but pass away apace in open view; in which departure, if by chance you either encounter, or aloof off throw your inquisitive eye upon any knight or squire, being your familiar, salute him not by his name of Sir such a one, or so; but call him Ned, or Jack, &c. This will set off your estimation with great men; and if, though there be a dozen companies between you, 'tis the better he call aloud to you, for that is most genteel, to know where he shall find you at two o'clock; tell him at such an ordinary, or such; and be sure to name those that are dearest, and whither none but your gallants resort. After dinner you may appear again, having translated yourself out of your English cloth cloak into a light Turkey grogram, if you have that happiness of shifting; and then be seen, for a turn or two, to correct your teeth with some quill or silver instrument, and to cleanse your gums with a wrought handkerchief; it skills not whether you dined or no that is best known to your stomach; or in what place you dined; though it were with cheese, of your own mother's making, in your chamber, or study.

Now if you chance to be a gallant not much crossed among citizens; that is, a gallant in the mercer's books, exalted for satins and velvets; if you be not so much blessed to be crossed (as I hold it the greatest blessing in the world to be great in no man's books), your Paul's walk is your only refuge: the Duke's tomb is a sanctuary, and will keep you alive from worms and landrats that long to be feeding on your carcass: there you may spend your legs in winter a whole afternoon; converse, plot, laugh, and talk anything; jest at your creditor, even to his face; and in the evening, even by lamp-light, steal out; and so cozen a whole covey of abominable catchpoles.

1 Old St Paul's Church was a common promenade. 2 Pacing horse. 3 The middle aisle of St Paul's. 4 A portion set apart for gentlemen's servants. 5 Tobacco is satirised not merely here and in King James's Counterblast (1604), but in Ben Jonson's plays and innumerable pamphlets and satires. 6 Automaton striking apparatus of the clock. 7 The tomb of Sir John Beauchamp, son of Guy, Earl of Warwick, was unaccountably called 'Duke Humphrey's Tomb,' and the dinnerless persons who lounged here were said to have dined with Duke Humphrey.'

Sleep.

For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel, that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that, though a man live with an empress, his heart cannot be at quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so

greatly are we indebted to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary half of our life to him; and there is good cause why we should do so; for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want, of wounds, et cares, of great men's oppressions, of captivity, whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings. Can we therefore surfeit on this delicate ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that, whereof to taste too little, tumbles us into a churchyard; and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no. Look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept threescore and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it!

Dekker's plays were collected by R. H. Shepherd in 4 vols. (1873), and his pamphlets in 5 vols. of Dr Grosart's 'Hut Library' (1884-86). Mr Rhys edited five plays for the Mermaid Series' (1887). See Mr Swinburne's Essay (1887).

John Webster.-The name of John Webster is the type of the obscurity which broods over so many of the poets of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. There is no one, of equal eminence, in the range of English literature of whom so little is known. Not a positive fact, not a reminiscence, not an anecdote, brings this shadowy figure before us for a moment, and we have to construct our impression of him entirely from his works. He was 'one born free of the Merchant-Tailors' Company;" according to Gildon, who wrote nearly a century later, he was clerk of St Andrew's parish in Holborn. It is thought that he began to write for the stage in 1602; the first examples of his work which we know that we possess are the additions he made to Marston's Malcontent in 1604; of these the fine induction' is the most notable. It has been supposed that he joined Dekker in writing Westward Ho in 1603 and Northward Ho in 1605, but these comedies were not printed until 1607. In the first of these Dekker's genius is predominant; the second, which is written in harsh prose, offers nothing characteristic of either poet. Webster was associated with Dekker in 1607 in the tragical history of Sir Thomas Wyat. Cæsar's Fall and The Two Harpies, still earlier collaborations, have disappeared altogether.

It is conjectured that The White Devil, or the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona, was acted in 1608, but it was not printed until 1612. It was followed on the boards by Appius and Virginia (published in 1654), by The Devil's Law-case (published in 1623), and The Duchess of Malfi (probably acted in 1612, although not printed until 1623). These four are the plays upon which Webster's reputation is supported, and they belong to the period immediately succeeding upon the retirement of Shakespeare to the country. By the time of Shakespeare's death Webster had in all probability ceased to produce dramatic work of importance. The City pageant of 1624 was 'invented and written by John Webster, merchanttailor,' and he is supposed to be the cloth-worker of that name who died in 1625. It will be seet. that this brief account is full of contestable matter,

yet it contains all that can even be guessed with any safety regarding the life and actions of the author of the White Devil.

Webster achieved little success in his own age, and was the object of no curiosity to the next. He was unknown until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Lamb and Hazlitt called attention to his merit. Since that time the fame of Webster has been more and more assured, and he holds a place below none of Shakespeare's satellites except Ben Jonson and Marlowe. Indeed, in the elements of pure tragedy he comes nearest to the master himself, and the Duchess of Malfi is unquestionably the most elevated tragic poem in the language not written by the pen of Shakespeare. 'No poet,' says Mr Swinburne, ascending to a still higher flight of praise, 'has ever so long and so successfully sustained at their utmost height and intensity the expressed emotions and the united effects of terror and pity.' This is, indeed, the main quality of Webster, its subtlety of pathetic horror. It is hardly critical, however, in any comparative consideration of this poet, to omit to acknowledge his dramatic shortcomings. His plays are exceedingly ill-constructed; most of them are mere clusters of scenes, violently put together, and eked out with dumb-show, in a manner so primitive that we seem to have gone back a generation, and to be listening to a poet ignorant of what Shakespeare, and even Jonson and Fletcher, had added to the capacities of stage-effect.

He

A bewildering inequality of execution is characteristic of every play of Webster's; this is less marked in Appius and Virginia, and perhaps in the Duchess of Malfi, than in the others. We are told that he was an extremely slow and painstaking writer, so that this apparent want of skill is not the result of heedlessness. But it invades even his versification, which is by turns among the best and among the worst which has come down to us from the early seventeenth century. The subjects which attracted Webster were all of an Italian source and character; he was attracted by the vehement types and issues provoked by a condition of society at once highly civilised and insolently lawless. found exactly what he wanted in several contemporary stories of intrigue and murder in the courts of Italy. He was perhaps a poet who by force of circumstances was forced on to the stage, rather than a born dramatist; for he seems to crowd too many incidents into each scene, too much variety of psychological passion into each character, for the simplicity of dramatic action. It will be felt by most unprejudiced readers that the scenes of horror which close his two great tragedies have been too readily applauded by Lamb and those who have succeeded him. It is, surely, not in the somersaults of these scuffling and yelling marionettes that Webster does real justice to his noble genius as a tragic poet. He is often a sort of exalted Mrs Radcliffe in his unrestrained affection for all the nightmares of romance, but it is not for

his poisoned daggers and clanking chains that we follow him spell-bound.

Webster owes the exalted station which has at length been successfully claimed for him by his admirers to his penetration into the troubled sources of human emotion. In the White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi, his two great tragical poems, this quality is seen displayed with least reserve. It saves Webster from the mere bloodand-thunder rhetoric of some of his contemporaries. because it displays to him those tender and pitiful incidents which spring up like flowers along the road of crime, and not merely lighten its horror, but add to it an exquisite pathos. The fourth act of the Duchess of Malfi, where the fortitude of the Duchess is put to so many awful and unprecedented tests, and the terror and pity of the audience is augmented at every change of scene, is one of the most amazing passages of fantastic tragedy ever composed in any language. It reaches its climax in the dark colloquy between Bosola, disguised as an old man, and the hunted woman who is 'Duchess of Malfi still.' The same effects, in cruder form, are to be met with in the White Devil, where the demons drag Vittoria downward, with her last cry,

'I am lost forever!'

ringing in our ears. This penetration and inventive power concentrated on violent emotion give Webster a unique place among poets. He would be still more amazing than he is were it possible for us to believe that he was not influenced by the tragedies of Shakespeare. But although he owes much to this overwhelming predecessor, Webster has a character among English poets entirely his own; he is the highest expression that we possess of the sinister pursuit of moral beauty in the literature of crime and horror.

From The White Devil.'
Francisco de Medicis. Your reverend mother
Is grown a very old woman in two hours.
I found them winding of Marcello's corse;
And there is such a solemn melody,

"Tween doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies;
Such as old grandams, watching by the dead,
Were wont t' outwear the nights with-that, believe me,

I had no eyes to guide me forth the room,
They were so o'ercharg'd with water.

Flamineo. I will see them.

[hand :

Cor. Will you make me such a fool? here's a white Can blood so soon be wash'd out? let me see;

When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops,

And the strange cricket i' th' oven sings and hops,
When yellow spots do on your hands appear,

Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.

Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! h'as handled a toad sure.

Cowslip water is good for the memory:

Pray, buy me three ounces of 't.

Flam. I would I were from hence.

Cor. Do you hear, sir?

I'll give you a saying which my grandmother

Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute.

Flam. Do, an you will, do.

Cornelia sings.

Call for the robin-red breast, and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole

The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,

To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm ;
But keep the wolf far thence, that 's foe to men,
For with his nails he 'll dig them up again.

(From Act v.)

From The Duchess of Malfil.'

Ferdinand. Where are you ?

Duchess. Here, sir.

Ferd. This darkness suits you well.

Duch. I would ask you pardon.

Ferd. You have it;

For I account it the honourablest revenge,

Where I may kill, to pardon. Where are your cubs? Duch. Whom?

Ferd. Call them your children,

For though our national law distinguish bastards
From true legitimate issue, compassionate nature
Makes them all equal.

Duch. Do you visit me for this?

You violate a sacrament o' the church,

Shall make you howl in hell for 't.

Ferd. It had been well

Could you have lived thus always : for, indeed,
You were too much i' th' light-but no more;
I come to seal my peace with you. Here's a hand
[Gives her a dead man's hand.

To which you have vowed much love: the ring upon't

You gave.

[Here is discovered, behind a traverse, the artificial figures at Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead. Bosola. Look you, here's the piece from which 'twasta et He doth present you this sad spectacle,

That, now you know directly they are dead,
Hereafter you may wisely cease to grieve

For that which cannot be recovered.

Duch. There is not between heaven and earth one wish I stay for after this. (From Act IV. sc. i`

Afterwards, in aggravation of his cruelty, the brother sends a troop of madmen from the hospital to make a concert round the duchess in prison. After they have danced and sung Bosola enters, disguised as an old man :

Duch. Is he mad too? . . . .

....

Bos. I am come to make thy tomb.

Duch. Ha! my tomb?

Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my death-bed,

Gasping for breath: Dost thou perceive me sick?

Bos. Yes, and the more dangerously, since thy sickness is insensible.

Duch. Thou art not mad sure: dost know me?
Bos. Yes.

Duch. Who am I?

Bos. Thou art a box of worm-seed; at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth. worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little tarf of grass; and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

Duch. Am not I thy duchess ?

Bos. Thou art some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead, clad in gray hairs, twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleepest

worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear: a little infant that breeds its teeth should it lie with thee, would cry out as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow.

Duch. I am Duchess of Malfi still.

Bos. That makes thy sleeps so broken.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright;
But, looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Duch. Thou art very plain.

Bos. My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living.

I am a tomb-maker.

Duch. And thou comest to make my tomb? Bos. Yes.

Duch. Let me be a little merry

Of what stuff wilt thou make it?

Bos. Nay, resolve me first; of what fashion?
Duch. Why, do we grow fantastical in our death-bed?

Do we affect fashion in the grave?

Bos. Most ambitiously. Princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks, as if they died of the toothache: they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the selfsame way they seem to turn their faces.

Duch. Let me know fully, therefore, the effect Of this thy dismal preparation,

This talk fit for a charnel.

Bos. Now I shall.

[Executioners with coffin, cords, and bell. Here is a present from your princely brothers; And may it arrive welcome, for it brings Last benefit, last sorrow.

Duch. Let me see it.

I have so much obedience in my blood,

I wish it in their veins to do them good.

Bos. This is your last presence-chamber.
Cariola. O my sweet lady.

Duch. Peace! it affrights not me.
Bos. I am the common bellman,

That usually is sent to condemned persons

The night before they suffer.

Duch. Even now thou saidst

Thou wast a tomb-maker.

Bos. 'Twas to bring you

By degrees to mortification: Listen.

Dirge.

Hark! now every thing is still;

The screech-owl and the whistler shrill
Call upon our dame aloud,

And bid her quickly don her shroud.

Much you had of land and rent;

Your length in clay 's now competent.
A long war disturbed your mind ;

Here your perfect peace is signed.

Of what is 't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping:
Their life a general mist of error;
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powder sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet,

And, the foul fiend more to check,

A crucifix let bless your neck.

'Tis now full tide 'tween night and day:
End your groan, and come away.

Car. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers ! Alas! What will you do with my lady? Call for help.

In

Duch. To whom; to our next neighbours? They are mad folks.

Bos. Remove that noise.

Duch. Farewell, Cariola.

my last will I have not much to give ;

A many hungry guests have fed upon me;

Thine will be but a poor reversion.

Car. I will die with her.

Duch. I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl

Say her prayers ere she sleep. [Cariola is forced out.

Ferd. Constantly.

Bos. Do you not weep?

Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.

The element of water moistens the earth,

But blood flies upwards, and bedews the heavens.
Ferd. Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
Bos. I think not so: her infelicity
Seemed to have years too many.

Ferd. She and I were twins:

And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.

Webster's works were collected by Dyce (1830), and edited by Hazlitt (1857-58); and Mr J. A. Symonds included the White Devil and the Duchess in a volume of the 'Mermaid Series' (1888). EDMUND GOSSE.

Cyril Tourneur, or TURNER (1575?-1626), dramatist, was possibly the son of Richard Turnor, Lieutenant of the Brill (the Dutch having in 1585 agreed to a temporary English occupation

of Briel and Flushing), served in the Low Countries, was secretary to Cecil in the Cadiz expedition, was put ashore sick at Kinsale on his return, and died in Ireland, February 28, 1626, leaving his widow destitute. In 1600 he published his Transformed Metamorphosis (discovered in 1872), a satirical poem, marred by pedantic affectations; in 1609 a Funeral Poem on the English governor of the Brill; in 1613 an Elegy on Prince Henry. His fame rests on two plays, the Revenger's Tragedy, printed in 1607, and the (earlier and poorer) Atheist's Tragedy, printed in 1611. The Revenger's Tragedy, an appalling tale of all the unholy passions, shows tragic intensity, condensed passion, fiery strength of phrase, cynical and bitter mockery. Hazlitt compared it to Webster's work; Fleay (without due reason) thought it was Webster's; Mr Swinburne, who eulogises this as Tourneur's own masterpiece, says the only other dramatist's work it resembles is Shakespeare's. Charles Lamb could never read it but his ears tingled. Ward, while admitting the tragic power of the play, says, almost with Swinburne's vehemence, that its plot 'is in its sewer-like windings one of the blackest and most polluting devised by the perverted imagination of an age prone to feed on the worst scandals of the Italian decadence,' and that it is 'pruriency steeped in horrors.' Mr Addington Symonds is equally decided, and calls it 'an entangled web of lust, incest, fratricide, rape, adultery, mutual suspicion, hate, and bloodshed.' The Atheist's Tragedy is less revolting, but has enough and to spare of unnatural wickedness, besides being crude and ill-constructed. The wicked uncle helps his nephew off to the wars in order that he may murder his brother, the good lord, at leisure, and secure the rich heiress, his nephew's betrothed, for his contemptible son. He hires an assassin to murder the excellent and unsuspicious brother, and apparently simply to torment the father's heart before his murder, suborns the murderer as a disguised soldier to bring the perfectly false intelligence that the son is dead. In mere superfluity of naughtiness the women seek their own dishonour, and a stage 'Puritan' eagerly agrees to carry out every villainy proposed to him. To one of his victims the worst villain of the piece, the uncle, says (explaining the title beforehand): No? Then invoke

Your great supposed protector. I will do 't.

To which the victim rather inconsequently replies :
Supposed protector! Are ye an atheist ? then
I know my prayers and tears are spent in vain.

It is significant that the passage which seems to contain the only really true and tender touch in the Atheist's Tragedy is the speech of the assassin, disguised as a soldier from the wars, telling the noble Montferrers the base lie about his son's death:

Borachio. The enemy, defeated of a fair

Advantage by a flatt'ring stratagem,

Plants all the artillery against the town;

Whose thunder and lightning made our bulwarks shake,
And threatened in that terrible report

The storm wherewith they meant to second it.
The assault was general. But, for the place
That promised most advantage to be forced,
The pride of all their army was drawn forth
And equally divided into front

And rear. They marched, and coming to a stand,
Ready to pass our channel at an ebb,

We advised it for our safest course, to draw
Our sluices up and mak 't impassable.
Our governor opposed and suffered them
To charge us home e'en to the rampier's foot.
But when their front was forcing up our breach
At push o' pike, then did his policy
Let go the sluices, and tripped up the heels
Of the whole body of their troop that stood
Within the violent current of the stream.
Their front, beleaguered 'twixt the water and
The town, seeing the flood was grown too deep
To promise them a safe retreat, exposed
The force of all their spirits (like the last
Expiring gasp of a strong-hearted man)
Upon the hazard of one charge, but were
Oppressed, and fell. The rest that could not swim
Were only drowned; but those that thought to 'scape
By swimming were by murderers that flanked
The level of the flood, both drowned and slain. ...
Walking next day upon the fatal shore,
Among the slaughtered bodies of their men,
Which the full stomached sea had cast upon
The sands, it was my unhappy chance to light
Upon a face whose favour, when it lived,
My astonished mind informed me I had seen.
He lay in his armour, as if that had been
His coffin; and the weeping sea, like one
Whose milder temper doth lament the death
Of him whom in his rage he slew, runs up
The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek;
Goes back again, and forces up the sands
To bury him; and every time it parts,
Sheds tears upon him; till at last, as if
It could no longer endure to see the man
Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him-with
A kind of unresolved unwilling pace,
Winding her waves one in another like

A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands,
For grief-ebbed from the body, and descends;
As if it would sink down into the earth,
And hide itself for shame of such a deed.

appearanc

From the same play comes the quaintly antithetical but pleasing Epitaph of Charlemont,' quite unlike Tourneur's usual thought or diction:

His body lies interr'd within this mould Who died a young man yet departed old, And all that strength of youth that man can have Was ready still to drop into his grave; Far ag'd in Virtue, with a youthful eye, He welcom'd it, being still prepared to die; And living so, though young depriv'd of breath, He did not suffer an untimely death; But we may say of his brave bless'd decease, He died in war and yet he died in peace. There is a complete edition of Cyril Tourneur by Churton Collins (1878); and of the two plays, with two of Webster's, by J. A Symonds (Mermaid Series,' 1888).