No dramatist showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain combined to make men miserable. He seems to have had a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals so powerfully. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds are sought for in the ruined places of abandoned lives, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of sin-haunted conscience, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed, the deaths of frantic hope-deserted criminals. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological elements of tragedy home to our imagination. He makes free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, masques, and nightmares. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature, his profound pity for the innocent who suffer shipwreck in the storm of evil passions not their own, save him, even at his gloomiest and wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists--Tourneur, for example--blundered. That the tendency to brood on what is ghastly belonged to Webster's idiosyncrasy appears in his use of metaphor. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a sinister turn--as thus: You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is _coffined_ in a baked meat, Afore you cut it open. When knaves come to preferment, they rise _as gallowses are raised_ in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders. Pleasure of life! what is't? only the _good hours of an ague_. I would sooner _eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague_ than kiss one of you fasting. In his dialogue, people bandy phrases like--"O you screech-owl!" and "Thou foul black cloud!" A sister warns her brother to think twice before committing suicide, with this weird admonition:-- I prithee, yet remember Millions are now in graves, which at last day Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking. But enough has now been said about these peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style. It is needful to become acclimatised to his specific mannerism, both in the way of working and the tone of thinking, before we can appreciate his real greatness as a dramatic poet and moralist. Then we recognise the truth of what has recently been written of him by an acute and sympathetic critic: "There is no poet morally nobler than Webster."[4] JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. _THE WHITE DEVIL; OR, VITTORIA COROMBONA._