the truth of deep human passion, the fire that labours without open rage or fury of flame at the heart's root and centre of life itself, the ravage of spiritual waste and agony of travail consuming and exhausting the very nature of the soul, which find shape and speech in the tragic verse of Ford, were beyond the dramatic reach of Byron. Of all men of genius Ford was probably the worst jester and Byron the worst playwright that ever lived. The living spirit of wit, its poetic and imaginative power, the force and ease of its action, the variety of thought and form into which it enters to fill them with life, never had a medium of expression comparable to the verse of Byron; in this, the compound and complex product of serious and humorous energy, rather than in power of any simple kind, lay the depth and width of his genius. Ford's dominion was limited to one simple form of power, the knowledge and mastery of passion properly so called, the science of that spiritual state in which the soul suffers force from some dominant thought or feeling: The pain and labour of such imperious possession, the strife and violence of a nature divided against itself, the strong anguish and the strong delight of extremities, gave the only fit field for his work and the only fruitful pasture for his thought. His imperative and earnest genius stamped and burnt itself into the figures and events of his plays: his mark is set ineffaceably on characters and circumstances, the sign-manual of his peculiar empire. Now, of passion proper Byron has nothing; the one radical emotion in him, deep as life and strong as death, is that noble ardour of rage and scorn which lifts his satire into sublimity; otherwise his passion is skin-deep;