Both playwrights indulge the late Elizabethan predilection for conceits. Webster, here as elsewhere, proves himself the finer artist. He inserts Vittoria's dream, Antonio's dialogue with Echo, Bosola's Masque of Madmen, accidentally and subserviently to action. Tourneur enlarges needlessly, but with lurid rhetorical effect, upon the grisly humours suggested by the skull of Vendice's dead mistress. Using similar materials, the one asserts his claim to be called the nobler poet by more steady observance of the Greek precept "Nothing overmuch." Words to the same effect might be written about their several employment of blank verse and prose. Both follow Shakespeare's distribution of these forms, while both run verse into prose as Shakespeare never did. Yet I think we may detect a subtler discriminative quality in Webster's most chaotic periods than we can in Tourneur's; and what upon this point deserves notice is that Webster, of the two, alone shows lyrical faculty. His three dirges are of exquisite melodic rhythm, in a rich low minor key; much of his blank verse has the ring of music; and even his prose suggests the colour of song by its cadence. This cannot be said of the sinister and arid Muse of Tourneur. She wears no evergreens of singing, nay, no yew-boughs even, on her forehead. Her dusky eyes sparkle with sharp metallic scintillations, as when Castiza says to her mother:-- Come from that poisonous woman there. _The Revenger's Tragedy_ is an entangled web of lust, incest, fratricide, rape, adultery, mutual suspicion, hate, and bloodshed, through which runs, like a thread of glittering copper, the vengeance of a cynical plague-fretted spirit. Vendice emerges from the tainted crew of Duke and Duchess, Lussurioso, Spurio and Junior, Ambitioso and Supervacuo, with a kind of blasted splendour. They are curling and engendering, a brood of flat-headed asps, in the slime of their filthy appetites and gross ambitions. He treads and tramples, on them all. But he bears on his own forehead the brands of Lucifer, the rebel, and of Cain, the assassin. The social corruption which transformed them into reptiles, has made him a fiend incarnate. Penetrated to the core with evil, conscious of sin far more than they are, he towers above them by his satanic force of purpose. Though ruined, as they are ruined, and by like causes, he maintains the dignity of mind and of volition. The right is on his side; the right of a tyrannicide, who has seen his own mistress, his own father, the wife of his friend, done to death by the brutalities of wanton princelings. But Tourneur did not choose to gift Vendice with elevation of nature. In the strongest scene of the play he showed this scorpion of revenge, stooping to feign a pander's part, tempting his mother and his sister as none but a moral leper could have done. In the minor scene of the duke's murder, he made