Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/69

 with Romelio in 'The Devil's Law-case,' an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such sudden snatches of funereal verse as this:

How then can any monument say 'Here rest these bones till the last day,' When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last day I shall be found.

The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is perceptible here and there in 'The Duchess of Malfy,' but comes to its head in 'The Devil's Law-case.' It cannot, I fear, be denied that Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre 'whose service is perfect freedom'—as Shakespeare found it, and combined with perfect loyalty