Webster tells us, in the Preface to "The White Devil," that he does not "write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers"; and also hints that the play failed in representation through its being acted in winter in "an open and black theatre," and because it wanted "a full and understanding auditory." "Since that time," he sagely adds, "I have noted most of the people that come to the playhouse resemble those ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the passionate and weighty _Nuntius_; yet after all this divine rapture, _O dura messorum ilia_, the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it." Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is the most Shakespearian. His genius was not only influenced by its contact with one side of Shakespeare's many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have been considering abound in expressions and situations either suggested by or directly copied from the tragedies of him he took for his model. Yet he seems to have had no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare to all other dramatists; and in his Preface to "The White Devil," after speaking of the "full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the labored and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without wrong last to be named," of "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekkar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felicitous a classification as would be made by a critic of our century, who should speak of the "right happy and copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master Dickens, and Master G. P. R. James.