out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The "prithee, undo this button" of _Lear_, by which Shakspeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of _Ferdinand_ when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement,-- "Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young." He has not the condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the _concellisti_, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples:-- "Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon, As some fantastics dream, I could wish all _men_, The whole race of them, for their inconstancy, Sent thither to people that!" (Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds,-- "And he invented _tents_, unless men lie,"-- implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.) "Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds: In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study, For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea, For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which Arise and spring up honor." ("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.) "Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this, She would not after the report keep fresh So long as flowers on graves." "For sin and shame are ever tied together With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun, They cannot without violence be undone." "One whose mind Appears more like a ceremonious chapel Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence." "Gentry? 'tis nought else But a superstitious relic of time past; And, sifted to the true worth, it is nothing But ancient riches." "What is death? The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free From Fortune's gunshot." "It has ever been my opinion That there are none love perfectly indeed, But those that hang or drown themselves for love," says _Julio_, anticipating Butler's "But he that drowns, or blows out's brains, The Devil's in him, if he feigns." He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron in their apophthegm concerning woman's last love. In "The Devil's Law-Case," _Leonora_ says: "For, as we love our youngest children best, So the last fruit of our affection, Wherever we bestow it, is most strong, Most violent, most unresistible; Since 'tis, indeed, our latest harvest-home, Last merriment 'fore winter."