For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid little play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis a very excellent piece of work"; may we never exactly look upon its like again! I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly probable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with the author of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and that either both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. I still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle For girls of nine: