ABSTRACT
Among English plays he was a great admirer of 'The Duchess of Malfy', and thought the dungeon scene, where she takes her executioners for allegorical personages, of Torture and Murder, or some such grim personifications as equal to anything in Shakespeare, indeed he was continually reading the Old Dramatists — Middleton, and Webster, Ford and Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, were the mines from which he drew the pure and vigorous style that so highly distinguished 'The Cenci'.
