Nothing which the English stage could display seemed to the minds of English playwrights and the public to give an adequate picture of the abominations of Italy; much as they heaped up horrors and combined them with artistic skill, much as they forced into sight, there yet remained an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century, of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the rebellious immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene, Peele, and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the great men who were thus enthralled by Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and Massinger maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit, resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from the immense scope of his vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of human nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger from the very superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies, which prevented his ever thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had himself invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger, the Italian evil weighed like a nightmare. With an infinitely powerful and passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless. The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in each of them. In Webster--no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian horrors, as we are apt to think of the greatest of our dramatists--after Shakespeare--in the noble and tender nature of Webster the sense is one of ineffable sadness, unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by hope. The villains, even if successful till death overtake them, are mere hideous phantoms--