They speak a language all their own, though with resemblances to their kinsmen in the other Elizabethan tragedies. The blank verse, far more flexible than in the early plays, presents a triumphant union of the conflicting tendencies toward decoration and naturalness observed in the other dramatists; and it is freely mingled with hardly less masterly prose. Marvelous in comparison with preceding verse is its extreme condensation in spite of its opulence of figures and aphorisms. Although crowded with thought and image, it is nevertheless, in its response to the varying persons and moods, superbly dramatic. A critic who is both a poet and a philosopher[21] objects to Macbeth's dagger "unmannerly breech'd with gore" as violent and crude in comparison with the historical reminiscences with which Homer might have made Achilles describe the weapon. But recall the scene. Macbeth has murdered the grooms and rushes from the chamber to confront the fearful suspicions of Duncan's sons and friends. Surely, his false and frenzied excuses must be over-fanciful, violent, and crude. "Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breech'd with gore." Such a style, however, does not readily give up opportunities for aphorism or beauty for the sake of absolute truth to situation or character. Still less does it mimic actual speech. It does give a potency to the stories, otherwise hardly conceivable; and it adds to truth of character the allurement of music and picture, and the idealization of a magnified suggestiveness. A father has reason to curse his daughter--gesture and incoherent words might correctly represent life; a plain sentence of Ibsen's might convey the tragedy of the situation--but it is the extravagant and terrible imprecation of Lear that has for centuries made men's imaginations shudder. Style such as this the drama will never recover. We shall sooner find another Shakespeare to blend its diverse elements than a host of dramatists, like the Elizabethans, fascinated by a newly discovered world of poetry and daringly adventurous in search of melody of verse, wealth of aphorism, luxury of fantasy, and truth to character.