His fame unto that pitch so only raised As not to be despised nor too much praised. A superficial critic speaks of "crabbed Webster, the playwright, cart-wright," and proceeds, at some length, to deride his laborious style and obscurity. Commendatory verses by S. Sheppard, Th. Middleton, W. Shirley, and John Ford prove, however, that Webster's tragedies won the suffrage of the best judges. None such are printed with Tourneur's plays. Webster began to write for the stage as early as 1601. Between that date and 1607 he worked upon Marston's _Malcontent_, and is supposed to have collaborated with Dekker in the _History of Sir Th. Wyatt, Northward Ho,_ and _Westward Ho_. Tourneur began his literary career by a satire called _Transformed Metamorphosis_, in 1600, which was followed in 1609 by a _Funeral Poem on the Death of Sir Francis Vere_. Both he and Webster published Elegies in 1613 upon the death of Prince Henry. In this year he was employed upon some business for the Court, as appears from this passage in the Revels Accounts (ed. Cunningham, p. xliii.): To Cyrill Turner, upon a warraunte signed by the Lord Chamberleyne and Mr. Chauncellor, dated at Whitehall, 23rd December, 1613, for his chardges and paines in carrying l'res for his Mats. service to Brussells.... X li. The amount of this payment renders it improbable that Tourneur's mission was of any political or diplomatical importance. We do not know when he commenced playwright; but _The Revenger's Tragedy_ was licensed in 1607 and printed in the same year. _The Atheist's Tragedy_ was printed in 1611; it had been written almost certainly at some earlier period. Webster's _White Devil_ was printed and probably produced in 1612; his _Duchess of Malfi_, produced perhaps in 1616, was printed in 1623. It is needful to dwell on the comparison of these dates, since they give Tourneur the priority of authorship in a style of tragedy which both poets cultivated with marked effect. Not to class them together as the creators of a singular type of drama would be uncritical. They elaborated similar motives, moved in the same atmosphere of moral gloom, aimed at the like sententious apophthegms, affected the same brevity and pungency, handled blank verse and prose on parallel methods, and owed debts of much the same kind to Shakespeare. That Webster was the greater writer, as he certainly possessed a finer cast of mind, and surveyed a wider sphere of human nature in his work, will be admitted. Yet it seems not impossible that he may have followed Tourneur's lead in the peculiar form and tone of his two masterpieces.