while her husband perpetrates the murder, like a bad angel which delays its flight only till it be assured that the whispered temptation has done its work. And in this combat scene, even the ancient and artless expedient used, of relating important events by messengers brought in for that sole end, and having no part in the action, may be noticed as belonging to an older form of the drama than Fletcher's, and as being very frequently practised by Shakspeare himself. * * * * * [Sidenote: The motives of the play of _The Two N. K._] In quitting our cursory examination of the qualities which distinguish the mechanical arrangement of the play, we may advert to the mode in which those influences are conceived which give motion to the incidents of the story, and regulate its progress. [Sidenote: Dramatic art defin'd.] The dramatic art is a representation of human character in action; and action in human life is prompted by passion, which the other powers of the mind serve only to guide, to modify, or to quell. In the conception of the passions which are chiefly operative in this drama, there seems to be much that is characteristic of a greater poet than Fletcher. [Sidenote: In _The Two N. K._ the moving passions are Love and Jealousy.] In the first place, the passions which primarily originate the action of the piece are simple; they are Love and Jealousy; the purest and most disinterested form of the one, and the noblest and most generous which could be chosen for the other. [Sidenote: This conception is Shakspere's.] The conception is Shakspeare's in its loftiness and magnanimity; and it is his also as being a direct appeal to common sympathies, modified but slightly by partial or fugitive views of nature. [Sidenote: The keeping close to the leading motives, is Shakspere's doing.] But it also resembles him in the singleness and coherence of design with [79:1]which the idea is seized and followed out. It cannot be necessary that I should specifically exemplify the closeness with which those ruling passions are brought to bear on the leading circumstances of the story from first to last. And it is almost equally superfluous to remind you, how far any such adherence to that unity of impulse, operates as evidence in a question between the two poets whom we have here to compare. [Sidenote: Fletcher's inability to work a character out, to keep one passion always in the front.] Fletcher, in common with other poets of all ranks inferior to the highest, is unable to preserve any one form of passion or of character skilfully in the foreground: he may seem occasionally to have proposed to himself the prosecution of such an end, but he either degenerates into the exhibition of a few over-wrought dramatic contrasts, or loses his way altogether amidst the complicated adventures with which he incumbers his stories. [Sidenote: Shakspere's definite purpose and keeping to it.] This inability to keep sight of an uniform design, is in