With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's power as a dramatist consists in confining the domain of his tragedy within definite limits, in excluding all variety of incident and character which could interfere with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and in the intensity with which he arrests, and the tenacity with which he holds the attention, as he drags the mind along the pathway which begins in misfortune or guilt, and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime on crime, with such fatal facility, that he would render the mind callous to his terrors, were it not that what is acted is still less than what is suggested, and that the souls of his characters are greater than their sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The crimes and the criminals belong to Italy as it was in the sixteenth century, when poisoning and assassination were almost in the fashion; the feelings with which they are regarded are English; and the result of the combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually were. Thus Ferdinand, in "The Duchess of Malfy," is the conception formed by an honest, deep-thoughted Englishman of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated in those maxims of policy which were generalized by Machiavelli. Webster makes him a devil, but a devil with a soul to be damned. The Duchess, his sister, is discovered to be secretly married to her steward; and in connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not only resolves on her death, but devises a series of preliminary mental torments to madden and break down her proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear; a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow." This mockery only brings from her firm spirit the proud assertion, "I am Duchess of Malfy still." Indeed, her mind becomes clearer and calmer as the tortures proceed. At first she had imprecated curses on her brothers, and cried, "Plagues that make lanes through largest families, Consume them!" But now, when the executioners appear, when her dirge is sung, containing those tremendous lines,