Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/326

 my judgment, poets of higher race and rarer quality. These two were Marlowe and Webster. The founder of our tragedy has in his best verse all the light and music and colour proper to the dawn of so divine a day as opened with his sunrise; and in Webster there is so much of the godhead which put on perfect humanity in Shakespeare alone, that it would scarcely be more rational to couple for comparison "The Broken Heart" with "The Duchess of Malfi" than "The Duchess of Malfi" with "King Lear." In one point Ford is excelled by others also of his age. As a lyric poet he is not quite of the highest class in that great lyrical school. Not that his few lyrics are unworthy the praise they have before now received; the best of them, such as the noble dirge which signals with its majesty of music the consummation of Calantha's agony, have an august beauty and dignity of their own. The verse has a marble stateliness and solidity; the grave and even measure carries weight and sufficiency with it; but the pure lyric note is not in this poet. He has no such outbreaks of birdlike or godlike song as Shakespeare's—

or Fletcher's—

or Webster's—

or Decker's—

After any of these the lyric verse of Ford strikes us as