He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them.
In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright;
But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.
Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them:
There's but three furies found in spacious hell;
But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell.
Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts of their own raising:
For these many years
None of our family dies, but there is seen
The shape of an old woman; which is given
By tradition to us to have been murdered
By her nephews for her riches.
Apparitions haunt them:
How tedious is a guilty conscience!
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me.
Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred, preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; the headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry: