a mere stage show it is so greatly conceived and so triumphantly wrought out, that even with less intense and delicate expression, with less elaborate and stately passion in the measure and movement of the words, it would stamp itself on the memory as a durable thing to admire; deep-based as it is on solemn and calm emotion, built up with choice and majestic verse, this great scene deserves even the extreme eulogy of its greatest critic.

The tragic genius of Ford takes a softer tone and more tender colour in "The Broken Heart" than in any of his other plays; except now and then in the part of Bassanes, there are no traces of the ferocity and brutality which mark in the tragedy preceding it such characters as Soranzo, Vasques, and Grimaldi. But here too there is something of Ford's severity, a certain rigid and elaborate precision of work, unlike the sweet seeming instinctiveness, the noble facility of manner and apparent impulse of gracious or majestic speech, which imbues and informs the very highest dramatic style; the quality which Marlowe and Shakespeare bequeathed to their successors, which kept fresh the verse of Beaumont and Fletcher despite its overmuch easiness and exuberance of mannerism, which gave life to the roughest outlines of Webster, Decker, Tourneur, which even Marston and Chapman, with all their faults of crudity and pedantry, showed when they had to rise to the height of any great and tragic argument. The same rigidity is noticeable to some extent in the characters: the marble majesty of Calantha is indeed noble and proper, and gives force and edge to the lofty passion of the catastrophe; but in Penthea too there is something over hard and severe;