Writers of an inferior genius may "upon horror's head horrors
accumulate", but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality,
they "terrify babes with painted devils", but they know not how a soul
is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.
VIII.--ON FORD'S _BROKEN HEART_.
I do not know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so
solemn, and so surprising as this. This is indeed, according to Milton,
to "describe high passions and high actions". The fortitude of the
Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without
expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of
the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with
a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the
last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom
are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering; these
torments
On the purest spirits prey
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense.
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