that they are not wanted again till towards the end of the play. Romelio, unaware of his mother's passion for Contarino, tells her, as a piece of good news she will be glad to hear, of what he has done. She at once resolves on a most horrible and unnatural revenge. Her speech has a kind of savage grandeur in it which Webster was fond of showing, for he rightly felt that it was his strongest quality, though it often tempted him too far, till it became bestial in its ferocity. It is to be observed that he was on his guard here, and gives us a hint, as you will see, in a highly imaginative passage, that Leonora's brain was turning: "I will make you chief mourner, believe it. Never was woe like mine. O, that my care And absolute study to preserve his life Should be his absolute ruin! Is he gone, then? There is no plague i'th' world can be compar'd To impossible desire; for they are plagu'd In the desire itself. Never, O, never Shall I behold him living, in whose life I liv'd far sweetlier than in mine own! A precise curiosity has undone me: why did I not To affect i'th honourable way of marriage son! For as we love our youngest children best, Express'd him stubborn-hearted; let me sink Webster forestalled Balzac by two hun She says declare Romelio illegitimate. that his true father was one Crispiano, a Spanish gentleman, the friend of her husband. Naturally when the trial comes on, Crispiano turns up in court as the very judge who is to preside over it. He first gets the year of the alleged adultery fixed by the oath of Leonora and her maid, and then remembers that Crispiano had told him of giving a portrait of himself to Leonora, has it sent for, and identifies himself by it, saying, prettily enough (those old dramatists have a way of stating dry facts so fancifully as to make them blossom, as it were), "Behold, I am the shadow of this shadow." He then proves an alibi at the date in question by his friend Ariosto, whom meanwhile he has just promoted to the bench in his own place by virtue of a convenient commission from the king of Spain, which he has in his pocket. At the end of the trial, the counsel for Leonora exclaimed: Ud's foot, we're spoiled. Why, our client is proved an honest woman!" Which I cite only because it reminds me to say that Webster has a sense of humor more delicate, and a way of showing it less coarse, than most of his brother dramatists. Meanwhile Webster saves Romelio from being hateful beyond possibility of condonation by making him perfectly fearless. He says finely: "I cannot set myself so many fathom An honest man, which I am very certain The last words convey an important and even profound truth. And let me say now, once for all, that Webster abounds, more than any of his contemporaries except Chapman, in these metaphysical apothegms, and that he introduces them naturally, while Chapman is too apt to drag them in by the ears. Here is another as good, I am tempted to say, as many of Shakespeare's, save only in avarice of words. When Leonora is suborning Winifred, her maid, to aid her in the plot against her son, she says: Come hither. dred years in what he says of a woman's I have a weighty secret to impart, last passion. The revenge on which she fixes is, at the cost of her own honor, to VOL. LXXXV.-No. 507.-42 But I would have thee first confirm to me The plot has other involutions of so unpleasant a nature now through change of manners that I shall but allude to them. They are perhaps intended to darken Romelio's character to the proper Websterian sable, but they certainly rather make an eddy in the current of the action than hasten it as they should. I have briefly analyzed this play because its plot is not a bad sample of a good many others, and because the play itself is less generally known than his deservedly more famous Vittoria Corombona and the Duchess of Malfi. Before coming to these, I will mention his Appius and Virginia, a spirited, well-constructed play (for here the simplicity of the incidents kept him within bounds), and, I think, as good as any other founded on a Roman story except Shakespeare's. It is of a truly Roman temper, and perhaps, therefore, incurs a suspicion of being cast iron. In The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona, produced in 1612, and the Duchess of Malfi, in 1616, are the two works by which Webster is remembered. these plays there is almost something like a fascination of crime and horror. Our eyes dazzle with them. The imagi nation that conceived them is a ghastly imagination. Hell is naked before it. It is the imagination of nightmare, but of no vulgar nightmare. I would rather call it fantasy than imagination, for there is something fantastic in its creations, and the fantastic is dangerously near to the grotesque, while the imagination, where it is most authentic, is most serene. Even to elicit strong emotion, it is the still small voice that is most effective; nor is Webster unaware of this, as I shall show presently. Both these plays are full of horrors, yet they do move pity and terror strongly also. We feel that we are under the control of a usurped and illegitimate power, but it is power. I remember seeing a picture in some Belgian church where an angel makes a motion to arrest the hand of the Almighty just as it is stretched forth in the act of the creation. If the angel foresaw that the world to be created was to be such a one as Webster conceived, we can fully understand his impulse. Through both plays there is a vapor of fresh blood and a scent of church-yard mould in the air. They are what children call creepy. Ghosts are ready at any moment. They seem, indeed, to have formed a considerable part of the population in those days. As an instance of the almost ludicrous way in which they were employed, take this stage direction from Chapman's Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois. "Music, and the ghost of Bussy enters leading the ghosts of the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatillon; they dance about the body and exeunt." It is fair to say that Webster's ghosts are far from comic. Let me briefly analyze the two plays. Vittoria Corombona, a beautiful woman, is married to Camillo, whom she did not love. She becomes the paramour of the Duke of Brachiano, whose Duchess is the sister of Francesco de' Medici and of Cardinal Monticelso. One of the brothers of Vittoria, Flamineo, is secretary to Brachiano, and contrives to murder Camillo for them. Vittoria, as there is no sufficient proof to fix the charge of murder upon her, is tried for incontinency, and sent to a house of Convertites, whence Brachiano spirits her away, meaning to marry her. In the mean while Brachiano's Duchess is got out of the way by poison, the lips of his portrait, which she kisses every night before going to bed, having been smeared with a deadly drug to that end. There is a Count Ludovico, who had proffered an unholy love to the Duchess, but had been repulsed by her, and he gladly offers himself as the minis ter of vengeance. Just as Brachiano is arming for a tournament arranged for the purpose by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Florence, Ludovico poisons his helmet, so that he shortly dies in torture. Ludovico then murders Vittoria, Zanche, her Moorish maid, and Flamineo, and is himself shot by the guards of the young Duke Giovanni, son of Brachiano, who break in upon him just as he has completed his butchery. There are but four characters in the play unstained with crime-Cornelia, Vittoria's mother; Marcello, her younger son; the Duchess of Brachiano; and her son, the young Duke. Fran. de' Med. Your reverend mother I had no eyes to guide me forth the room, Flam. I will see them. Fran. de' Med. "Twere much uncharity in you, for your sight Will add unto their tears. Flam. I will see them: They are behind the traverse; I'll discover [Draws the curtain. Cornelia, Zanche, and three other Ladies discovered winding Marcello's corse. A song. Cor. This rosemary is wither'd. Pray, get fresh, "Twill keep my boy from lightning. This sheet Zanche. Look you who are yonder. Cor. O, reach me the flowers. Zanche. Her ladyship's foolish. Lady. Alas, her grief Hath turn'd her child again! Cor. You're very welcome: There's rosemary for you; and rue for you; [To Flamineo. Heart's-ease for you; I pray make much of it: I have left more for myself. Fran, de' Med. Lady, who's this? Cor. You are, I take it, the grave-maker. Flam. So. Zanche. 'Tis Flamineo. The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole no But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, But I have an answer for them: "Let holy church receive him duly, Since he paid the church-tithes truly." His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store; [Exeunt Cornelia, Zanche, and Ladies. Flam. I have a strange thing in me, to the which I cannot give a name, without it be [Exit Francesco de' Medici. As In the trial scene the defiant haughtiness of Vittoria, entrenched in her illustrious birth, against the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of Browning's Ottima, "magnificent in sin," excites a sympathy which must check itself if it would not become admiration. She dies with the same unconquerable spirit, not shaming in death at least the blood of the Vitelli that ran in her veins. to Flamineo, I think it plain that but for Iago he would never have existed; and it has always interested me to find in Webster more obvious reminiscences of Shakespeare, without conscious imitation of him, than in any other dramatist of the time. Indeed the style of Shakespeare cannot be imitated, because it is the expression of his individual genius. Coleridge tells us that he thought he was Cor. Will you make me such a fool? Here's a copying it when writing the tragedy of white hand: Can blood so soon be wash'd out? Let me see: When yellow spots do on your hands appear, Cowslip-water is good for the memory. Flam. I would I were from hence. I'll give you a saying which my grandmother Remorse, and found, when all was done, that he had reproduced Massinger instead. Iago seems to me one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary divinations. He has embodied in him the corrupt Italian intellect of the Renaissance. Flamineo is a more degraded example of the same type, but without Iago's motives of hate and revenge. He is a mere incarnation of selfish sensuality. These two tragedies of Vittoria Corombona and the Duchess of Malfi are, I should say, the most vivid pictures of that repulsively fascinating period that we have in English. Alfred de Musset's Lorenzaccio is, however, far more terrible, because there the horror is moral wholly, and never physical, as too often in Webster. There is something in Webster that reminds me of Victor Hugo. There is the same confusion at times of what is big with what is great, the same fondness for the merely spectacular, the same insensibility to repulsive details, the same indifference to the probable or even to the natural, the same leaning toward the grotesque, the same love of effect at what ever cost; and there is also the same im- OUR ONLY DAY. BY COATES KINNEY. WERE this our only day, Did not our yesterdays and morrows give Not merely what we are, But what we were and what we are to be, At once would love forget Its keen pursuits and coy delays of bliss, And who, to win a friend, Would to the secrets of his heart invite Who, too, would pause to prate Of insult, or remember slight or scorn, Who would this night lie down to sleep with hate, Who would take heed to wrong, To misery's complaint or pity's call, The long wail of the weak against the strong, And what were wealth with shame, The vanity of office, pride of caste, The winy sparkle of the bubble fame, Ay, what were all days worth, Were there no looking backward or before- But each day is a link Of days that pass and never pass away: THE ITALIAN ARMY. BY G. GOIRAN, GENERAL STAFF COLONEL. TALY, lying partly in the Mediterranean Sea, and with on one side France, a sister but rival nation, and on the other the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where so many interests of its Slavic, German, and Latin races mingle, seems by its very geographical position to be destined to participate more or less directly in any conflict in which other European powers may become involved. The history of the Italian army connects itself not only with that of the Italian revolution, but also, and more especially, with the history of the army of the former kingdom of Sardinia. It was, in fact, the kingdom of Sardinia that took the lead of the Italian movement for independence, and gave it the support of its arms in 1848 and 1849, and then again in 1859, carrying it to happy consummation through its diplomacy and the campaigns of 1859, '60, '61, '66, '70. It was during those campaigns that the Sardinian army, steadily increased by new accessions from all parts of Italy, became transformed into the Italian army. In the time previous to the French invasion of 1796-7, and in that which followed from 1814 to 1859, all the principal states into which Italy was politically divided maintained, it is true, standing armies, but these were only partially recruited among the citizens, hired foreigners forming in most cases the principal bodies or the main nucleuses. One state only, namely, the one governed by the house of Savoy, was an exception to this rule. That state always kept up a standing army, small but well trained and disciplined, in which the native element had the predominance. Ever since the time of Emmanuel Philibert, all the Dukes of Savoy, who became later on Kings of Sardinia, wisely made the army an object of their special attention and constant care. It was their solicitude for the army that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prevented Italy from becoming entirely a prey to Austria, Spain, or France. Victor Amadeus II., and more especially his son, Charles Emmanuel III., whose reign extended over forty-two years, saved Italy from such a fate. His successor, though for forty-four years-1748-92- undisturbed by war, did by no means neglect the army. So that when, in the time of the French revolution, the soldiers of the republic tried to pass the Alps, they met with the most stubborn resistance on the part of the small but valiant army, and after five years only succeeded in evading it through the strategy of the greatest general of modern times. Then, at the first blast of the Napoleonic tempest, the armies of all the states of Italy, including that of the republic of Venice, were scattered. However, some of the Sardinian regiments were allowed to keep up their traditions, even after their aggregation to the French army, in which they distinguished themselves on more than one battle-field. After 1814, Austria, then mistress of the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, forced the inhabitants of those provinces to do military service in the interior territory of her empire, mingling them with the troops of her Slavic and German subjects. The minor Italian states had but poorly organized military establishments. Of the two more important states, viz., the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and that of Sardinia, the former maintained an army not indeed deficient in technical skill, but lacking military spirit, and its masters, the Bourbons, inflicted upon it, as well as upon the people, the shame of surrounding themselves with foreign troops as a kind of body-guard. The kingdom of Sardinia, on the contrary, following up, after 1814, the military traditions which had been interrupted by French invasion, reconstituted its army with elements entirely national, and organized and disciplined it so well that in the campaign of 1848-9 it fought with honor and valor worthy of better success. It was natural and just, then, that in the history of the Italian revolution the honor of raising the flag of independence and unity in 1859, and of constituting the nucleus of the army of resurrected Italy, should have been reserved to the army of Savoy, which had generously shed its blood, first to save Italy from French invasion (1792-6), and then again in 1848-9 to free her from the yoke of Austria. By the organization of 1862 the military establishment of the kingdom of Italy was |