These thoughts were suggested to me by the gratuitous miscellaneousness of plot (if I may so call it) in some of the plays of John Webster, concerning whose works I am to say something this evening, a complication made still more puzzling by the motiveless conduct of many of the characters. When he invented a plot of his own, as in his comedy of “The Devil’s Law Case,” the improbabilities become insuperable, by which I mean that they are such as not merely the understanding but the imagination cannot get over. For mere common-sense has little to do with the affair. Shakespeare cared little for anachronisms, or whether there were seaports in Bohemia or not, any more than Calderon cared that gunpowder had not been invented centuries before the Christian era when he wanted an arquebus to be fired, because the noise of a shot would do for him what a silent arrow would not do. But, if possible, the understanding should have as few difficulties put in its way as possible. Shakespeare is careful to place his Ariel in the not yet wholly disenchanted Bermudas, near which Sir John Hawkins had seen a mermaid not many years before, and lays the scene for his Oberon and Titania in the dim remoteness of legendary Athens, though his clowns are unmistakably English, and though he knew as well as we do that Puck was a British goblin. In estimating material improbability as distinguished from moral, however, we should give our old dramatists the benefit of the fact that all the world was a great deal farther away in those days than in ours, when the electric telegraph puts our button into the grip of whatever commonplace our planet is capable of producing. Moreover, in respect of Webster as of his fellows, we must, in order to understand them, first naturalize our minds in _their_ world. Chapman makes Byron say to Queen Elizabeth:-- “These stars, Whose influences for this latitude Distilled, and wrought in with this temperate air, And this division of the elements, Have with your reign brought forth more worthy spirits For counsel, valour, height of wit, and art, Than any other region of the earth, Or were brought forth to all your ancestors.”