in prose issued under that more than promising title:  which yet, if attainable, ought surely to be reprinted, however dubious may be its claim to the honor of a great poet’s authorship.  In no case can it possibly be of less interest or value than the earliest extant publication of that poet—­“The Transformed Metamorphosis.”  Its first editor has given proof of very commendable perseverance and fairly creditable perspicacity in his devoted attempt at elucidation of this most astonishing and indescribable piece of work:  but no interpretation of it can hope to be more certain or more trustworthy than any possible exposition of Blake’s “Jerusalem” or the Apocalypse of St. John.  All that can be said by a modest and judicious reader is that any one of these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola, that a Renan is no safer than a Cumming, from the chance of confutation as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance:  but that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad without a keeper will be likely to pretend to a positive understanding of what that significance may be.  To me, the most remarkable point in Tourneur’s problematic poem is the fact that this most monstrous example of senseless and barbarous jargon that ever disfigured English type should have been written—­were it even for a wager—­by one of the purest, simplest, most exquisite and most powerful writers in the language.

This extraordinary effusion is the single and certainly the sufficient tribute of a great poet, and a great master of the purest and the noblest English, to the most monstrous and preposterous taste or fashion of his time.  As the product of an eccentric imbecile it would be no less curious than Stanihurst’s Virgil:  as the work of Cyril Tourneur it is indeed “a miracle instead of wit.”  For it cannot be too often repeated that in mere style, in commanding power and purity of language, in positive instinct of expression and direct eloquence of inspiration, the author of “The Revenger’s Tragedy” stands alone in the next rank to Shakespeare.  Many if not most of their contemporaries could compose a better play than he probably could conceive—­a play with finer variation of incidents and daintier diversity of characters:  not one of them, not even Webster himself, could pour forth poetry of such continuous force and flow.  The fiery jet of his molten verse, the rush of its radiant and rhythmic lava, seems alone as inexhaustible as that of Shakespeare’s.  As a dramatist, his faults are doubtless as flagrant as his merits are manifest:  as a writer, he is one of the very few poets who in their happiest moments are equally faultless and sublime.  The tone of thought or of feeling which gives form and color to this splendid poetic style is so essentially what modern criticism would define as that of a natural