Monsters as they may seem of
unnatural egotism and unallayed ferocity, the one who dies penitent,
though his repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as any ever
wrought by miraculous conversion, dies as thoroughly in character as the
one who takes leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony
which hardly passes off at last into a mood of mocking and triumphant
resignation. There is a cross of heroism in almost all Webster's
characters which preserves the worst of them from such hatefulness as
disgusts us in certain of Fletcher's or of Ford's: they have in them
some salt of manhood, some savor of venturesome and humorous resolution,
which reminds us of the heroic age in which the genius that begot them
was born and reared--the age of Richard Grenville and Francis Drake,
Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.
The earliest play of Webster's now surviving--if a work so piteously
mutilated and defaced can properly be said to survive--is a curious
example of the combined freedom and realism with which recent or even
contemporary history was habitually treated on the stage during the
last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The noblest poem known to
me of this peculiar kind is the play of "Sir Thomas More," first printed
by Mr.
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