Rupert Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, New York, John Lane, 1906, p. 160.

The chief value of working through a note-book from a literary point of view, is this. A man tends to collect quotations, phrases, and ideas, that particularly appeal to and fit in with his own personality. If that personality is a strong one, and the point of his work is the pungency with which it is imbued with this strong taste, the not too injudcious agglutination of these external fragments will vastly enrich and heighten the total effect. And this is, on the whole what happens with Webster. The heaping-up of images and phrases helps to confuse and impress the hearer, and gives body to a taste that might otherwise have been too thin to carry. Webster, in fine, belongs to the caddis-worm school of writers, who dot not become their complete selves until they are incrusted with a thousand orts and chips and fragments from the world around.