Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be--‘rearranged for the modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it, that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors--the modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to _them_--as on account of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style. The similes of Webster--pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of the imagery of his contemporaries--are rather lost upon a public and upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately simplicity--born writer, rather than playwright--requires to be heard by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures so characteristic of the Italian temperament--a temperament never more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty--when these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess--when crazy folk yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one--an audience without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.