The Works of Donald G Mitchell Author:Donald Grant Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of. a different strain. WEBSTER, FORD, AND OTHERS All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shak... more »espeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare. Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly—one time as "merchant tailor;" and there are other intimations that he may have held some church "clerkship;" but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame1 had slipped away frompeople's knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist's deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dyce l wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopaedic writing in declaring this dramatist to be "hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world." 'The extreme limits of his life and career would probably lie between 1575 and 1635; Strahan's Biographical Dictionary of the last century makes no mention of him; nor does the Biographie Universelle of as early date. Webster was not a j...« less