has discovered that “none of Rowley’s other works are equal to this.”  Assuredly they are not—­in utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel.  Rowley was a vigorous artist in comedy and an original master of tragedy:  he may have written the lighter or broader parts of the play which rather unluckily took its name from these, and Webster may have written the more serious or sentimental parts:  but there is not the slightest shadow of a reason to suppose it.  An obviously apocryphal abortion of the same date, attributed to the same poets by the same knave, has long since been struck off the roll of Webster’s works.

The few occasional poems of this great poet are worth study by those who are capable of feeling interest in the comparison of slighter with sublimer things, and the detection in minor works of the same style, here revealed by fitful hints in casual phrases, as that which animates and distinguishes even a work so insufficient and incompetent as Webster’s “tragecomoedy” of “The Devil’s Law-case.”  The noble and impressive extracts from this most incoherent and chaotic of all plays which must be familiar to all students of Charles Lamb are but patches of imperial purple sewn on with the roughest of needles to a garment of the raggedest and coarsest kind of literary serge.  Hardly any praise can be too high for their dignity and beauty, their lofty loyalty and simplicity of chivalrous manhood or their deep sincerity of cynic meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness:  and the reader who turns from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy.  He will find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that “the plot is of no use except to bring in the fine things.”  The plot is in this instance absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of confused and distracting extravagance that the reader’s attention may at times be withdrawn from the all but unqualified ugliness of its ethical tone or tendency.  Two of Webster’s favorite types, the meditative murderer or philosophic ruffian, and the impulsive impostor who is liable to collapse into the likeness of a passionate penitent, will remind the reader how much better they appear in tragedies which are carried through to their natural tragic end.  But here, where the story is admirably opened and the characters as skilfully introduced, the strong interest thus excited at starting is scattered or broken or trifled away before the action is half-way through:  and at its close the awkward violence or irregularity of moral and scenical effect comes to a crowning crisis in the general and mutual condonation of unnatural perjury and attempted murder with which the victims and the criminals agree to hush up all grudges, shake hands all round, and live happy ever after.  There is at least one point of somewhat repulsive resemblance between the story of this play and that of Fletcher’s “Fair Maid of the Inn”:  but Fletcher’s play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster’s, is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more interesting, and more intelligent if not more imaginative.