They were, at worst, less painful than
the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the "lidless dragon
eyes", of present fashionable tragedy.
VII.--ON WEBSTER'S _DUCHESS OF MALFI_.
All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the Duchess's
death is ushered in, are not more remote from the conceptions of
ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they
seem to bring upon their victims is beyond the imagination of ordinary
poets. As they are not like inflictions _of this life_, so her language
seems _not of this world_. She has lived among horrors till she is
become "native and endowed unto that element". She speaks the dialect
of despair, her tongue has a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in
bale.--What are "Luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of Perillus,
Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the
wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's
dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to
touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear,
to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in
with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit--this only a Webster
can do.
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