" For it cannot be too often repeated
that in mere style, in commanding power and purity of language, in
positive instinct of expression and direct eloquence of inspiration, the
author of "The Revenger's Tragedy" stands alone in the next rank to
Shakespeare. Many if not most of their contemporaries could compose a
better play than he probably could conceive--a play with finer variation
of incidents and daintier diversity of characters: not one of them, not
even Webster himself, could pour forth poetry of such continuous force
and flow. The fiery jet of his molten verse, the rush of its radiant and
rhythmic lava, seems alone as inexhaustible as that of Shakespeare's. As
a dramatist, his faults are doubtless as flagrant as his merits are
manifest: as a writer, he is one of the very few poets who in their
happiest moments are equally faultless and sublime. The tone of thought
or of feeling which gives form and color to this splendid poetic style
is so essentially what modern criticism would define as that of a
natural Hebraist, and so far from that of a Hellenist or Latinist of the
Renascence, that we recognize in this great poet one more of those
Englishmen of genius on whom the direct or indirect influence of the
Hebrew Bible has been actually as great as the influences of the country
and the century in which they happened to be born.
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