In the trial scene the defiant haughtiness of Vittoria, entrenched in her illustrious birth, against the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of Browning’s Ottima, “magnificent in sin,” excites a sympathy which must check itself if it would not become admiration. She dies with the same unconquerable spirit, not shaming in death at least the blood of the Vitelli that ran in her veins. As to Flamineo, I think it plain that but for Iago he would never have existed; and it has always interested me to find in Webster more obvious reminiscences of Shakespeare, without conscious imitation of him, than in any other dramatist of the time. Indeed, the style of Shakespeare cannot be imitated, because it is the expression of his individual genius. Coleridge tells us that he thought he was copying it when writing the tragedy of “Remorse,” and found, when all was done, that he had reproduced Massinger instead. Iago seems to me one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary divinations. He has embodied in him the corrupt Italian intellect of the Renaissance. Flamineo is a more degraded example of the same type, but without Iago’s motives of hate and revenge. He is a mere incarnation of selfish sensuality. These two tragedies of “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi” are, I should say, the most vivid pictures of that repulsively fascinating period that we have in English. Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio” is, however, far more terrible, because there the horror is moral wholly, and never physical, as too often in Webster. There is something in Webster that reminds me of Victor Hugo. There is the same confusion at times of what is big with what is great, the same fondness for the merely spectacular, the same insensibility to repulsive details, the same indifference to the probable or even to the natural, the same leaning toward the grotesque, the same love of effect at whatever cost; and there is also the same impressiveness of result. Whatever other effect Webster may produce upon us, he never leaves us indifferent. We may blame, we may criticise, as much as we will; we may say that all this ghastliness is only a trick of theatrical blue-light; we shudder, and admire nevertheless. We may say he is melodramatic, that his figures are magic-lantern pictures that waver and change shape with the curtain on which they are thrown: it matters not; he stirs us with an emotion deeper than any mere artifice could stir. IV CHAPMAN