decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is
Dekker's, and all the poetry Massinger's. He confesses--as indeed he
is forced to do--that 'Massinger himself is not free from dialogues
of low wit and buffoonery'; and then, after calling the scenes in
question 'detestable ribaldry, 'a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of
filth and dulness,' recommends them to the reader's supreme scorn and
contempt,--with which feelings the reader will doubtless regard them:
but he will also, if he be a thinking man, draw from them the
following conclusions: that even if they be Dekker's--of which there
is no proof--Massinger was forced, in order to the success of his
play, to pander to the public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate
these villanies; that the play which, above all others of the
seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety,
devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any
extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of
the Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had
to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable to
the laws against abominable publications.

No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have
quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly
a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we
complain do not exist,--few of which they do not form an integral
part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the
morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?

Look, then, at Webster's two masterpieces, 'Vittoria Corrombona' and
the 'Duchess of Malfi.' A few words spent on them will surely not be
wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best
tragedies written since Shakspeare's time.