Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/301

 lightning or of swords. There are few indeed outside the pale of the very greatest who can display at will their natural genius in the keenest concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. But among these fewer than few stands the author of 'The Revenger's Tragedy.' The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample, that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxurious and sardonic, cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more passionate reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue that follows them.

Mother. Troth, he says true. Castiza.False: I defy you both: I have endured you with an ear of fire: Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face. Mother, come from that poisonous woman there. Mother. Where? Castiza. Do you not see her? she's too inward then.