Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye on the technique. I do not know from what writing of Coleridge Swinburne draws the assertion that “Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion,” but in the essay from which Swinburne quotes elsewhere Coleridge merely speaks of the “unnaturally irrational passions,” a phrase much more defensible. Upon the whole, the two poets are in harmony upon the subject of Massinger; and although Coleridge has said more in five pages, and said it more clearly, than Swinburne in thirty-nine, the essay of Swinburne is by no means otiose: it is more stimulating than Coleridge’s, and the stimulation is never misleading. With all his superlatives, his judgment, if carefully scrutinized, appears temperate and just. With all his justness of judgment, however, Swinburne is an appreciator and not a critic. In the whole range of literature covered, Swinburne makes hardly more than two judgments which can be reversed or even questioned: one, that Lyly is insignificant as a dramatist, and the other, that Shirley was probably unaffected by Webster. The _Cardinal_ is not a cast of the _Duchess of Malfi_, certainly; but when Shirley wrote the mist is risen, and there’s none To steer my wandering bark. (_Dies._) he was probably affected by My soul, like to a ship in a black storm, Is driven, I know not whither. Swinburne’s judgment is generally sound, his taste sensitive and discriminating. And we cannot say that his thinking is faulty or perverse—up to the point at which it is thinking. But Swinburne stops thinking just at the moment when we are most zealous to go on. And this arrest, while it does not vitiate his work, makes it an introduction rather than a statement.