_Win._ Why, mistress, ’t is your only way To enjoin me first that I reveal to you The worst act I e’er did in all my life; One secret so shall bind another. _Leon._ Thou instruct’st me Most ingeniously; for indeed it is not fit, Where any act is plotted that is naught, Any of counsel to it should be good; And, in a thousand ills have happ’d i’ th’ world, The intelligence of one another’s shame Hath wrought far more effectually than the tie Of conscience or religion.” The plot has other involutions of so unpleasant a nature now through change of manners that I shall but allude to them. They are perhaps intended to darken Romelio’s character to the proper Websterian sable, but they certainly rather make an eddy in the current of the action than hasten it as they should. I have briefly analyzed this play because its plot is not a bad sample of a good many others, and because the play itself is less generally known than Webster’s deservedly more famous “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” Before coming to these, I will mention his “Appius and Virginia,” a spirited, well-constructed play (for here the simplicity of the incidents kept him within bounds), and, I think, as good as any other founded on a Roman story except Shakespeare’s. It is of a truly Roman temper, and perhaps, therefore, incurs a suspicion of being cast iron. Webster, like Ben Jonson, knew, theoretically at least, how a good play should be put together. In his preface to “The Devil’s Law-Case” he says: “A great part of the grace of this lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of the language and ingenious structure of the scene arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.”