The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, of facility, and of
freshness: the style of his later play, I must repeat, is comparable
only with Shakespeare's. In the superb and inexhaustible imprecations of
Timon there is a quality which reminds us of Cyril Tourneur as
delightfully as we are painfully reminded of John Marston in reading
certain scenes and passages which disfigure and deface the magnificent
but incomprehensible composition of "Troilus and Cressida."
Of Tourneur's two elegies on the death of Sir Francis Vere and of Henry
Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's
work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has
shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent
in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic
in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such
noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and
fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common
courtesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of such unqualified
severity on the lamentation of Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the
Good: and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented person will
scarcely maintain that this loss was of such grave importance to England
as the loss of a prince who might probably have preserved the country
from the alternate oppression of prelates and of Puritans, from the
social tyranny of a dictator and the political disgrace of the
Restoration.
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