The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce and savage pathos in the note of it; a cadence which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter as utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weeping and wailing, for curses or for prayers, than anything in dramatic poetry outside the part of Hamlet. It would be a conjecture not less plausible than futile, though perhaps not less futile than plausible, which should suggest that the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet may be responsible for the creation of Tourneur's Vindice, and the influence of Tourneur's Vindice for the creation of Shakespeare's Timon. It is a certainty indisputable except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike the general style of either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the parallel" between Tourneur and Marston, "as far as it goes, is so obvious that it is not worth drawing," it is no less certain that the diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified it--perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's unmerciful but salutary ridicule--he approved himself a far abler writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had forgotten its cunning as the hand of "a tragic penman." Now the improvement of Tourneur's style, an improvement amounting to little less than transfiguration, keeps time with his advance as a student of character and a tragic dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet. The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, of facility, and of freshness: the style of his later play, I must repeat, is comparable only with Shakespeare's. In the superb and inexhaustible imprecations of Timon there is a quality which reminds us of Cyril Tourneur as delightfully as we are painfully reminded of John Marston in reading certain scenes and passages which disfigure and deface the magnificent but incomprehensible composition of "Troilus and Cressida."