Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/294

 an eccentric imbecile it would be no less curious than Stanihurst's Virgil: as the work of Cyril Tourneur it is indeed 'a miracle instead of wit.' 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 colour 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 recognise in this great poet one more of those Englishmen of genius on whom the direct or