In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the interest is perhaps, on the whole, rather better sustained than in "The Wonder of Women." The prologue to "Antonio's Revenge" (the second part of the "Historie of Antonio and Mellida") has enjoyed the double correlative honor of ardent appreciation by Lamb and responsive depreciation by Gifford. Its eccentricities and perversities of phrase[1] may be no less noticeable, but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, wayward and savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and such dispraise. The youngest student of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly fail to recognize this when he compares the vivid and piercing description of the death of Mellida with the fearful and supernatural impression of the scene which brings or thrusts before us the immolation of the child, her brother. [Footnote 1: One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a palpable misprint--_ramps_ for _cramps_.] The labored eccentricity of style which signalizes and disfigures the three chief tragedies or tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational choice of expression in his less ambitious and less unequal works. It is almost impossible to imagine any insertion or addition from the hand of Webster which would not be at once obvious to any reader in the text of "Sophonisba" or in either part of "Antonio and Mellida." Their fierce and irregular magnificence, their feverish and strenuous intemperance of rhetoric, would have been too glaringly in contrast with the sublime purity of the greater poet's thought and style In the tragicomedy of "The Malcontent," published two years later than the earlier and two years earlier than the later of these poems, if the tone of feeling is but little changed or softened, the language is duly clarified and simplified. "The Malcontent, (augmented) by Marston, with the additions written by John Webster," is as coherent, as harmonious, as much of a piece throughout, as was the text of the play in its earlier state. Not all the conscientious art and skill of Webster could have given this uniformity to a work in which the original design and execution had been less in keeping with the bent of his own genius and the accent of his natural style. Sad and stern, not unhopeful or unloving, the spirit of this poem is more in harmony with that of Webster's later tragedies than with that of Marston's previous plays; its accent is sardonic rather than pessimistic, ironical rather than despondent. The plot is neither well conceived nor well constructed; the catastrophe is little less than