Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unspherèd flame, visits't the springs
Of spirits immortal. Now, as swift as Time
Doth follow motion, find th' eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musæan story,
Inscribing it to deathless memory:

Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep

That neither's draught be consecrate to sleep:
Tell it how much his late desires I tender

(If yet it know not), and to light surrender
My soul's dark offspring."

But whatever our opinions may be as to the attending circumstances, the parish register leaves us in no doubt as to the main fact by recording the burial of “ Christopher Marlow, slaine by ffrancis Archer, the 1 of June, 1593." The old church of St. Nicholas at Deptford has been enlarged and rebuilt, and restored and re-restored, till nothing of the original except the old grey tower remains, and it is vain even to guess at the spot in which the body of the young poet was laid. He died we may well suppose in the worst inn's worst room, and his grave was dug we may be certain in the obscurest corner of the churchyard; but even had it been otherwise, all knowledge of the locality would have passed away during the dark hundred years in which Christopher Marlowe became a name unknown.* The Reverend Daniel Lysons was a man of letters," well read in "standard authors," and had made a narrow scrutiny of the Deptford registers; but, in 1796, when he published his account of the "Towns, Villages, and Hamlets within Twelve Miles of London," he passed over the record above quoted as one in which no human being was likely to feel interest. He bestows twentysix quarto pages on this particular parish, and devotes several of them to extracts from the registers, which he says commence in the year 1563. In his anxiety that every entry of importance should be preserved, he is careful to transcribe the particulars of the

16

A century ago the ignorance of the general public regarding the early English writers was something portentous. John Monck Mason, when he published his edition of Massinger in 1779, informs his readers that "notwithstanding my partiality for this kind of reading, and some pains I had taken to gratify it, I never heard of Massinger till about two years ago, when a friend of mine, who knew my inclination, lent me a copy of his works!" Dean Stanley, however, goes too far when he tells us of Michael Drayton that "after the lapse of not much more than a hundred years, Goldsmith, in his visit to the Abbey, could say, when he saw his monument, 'Drayton! I never heard of him before."" But Goldsmith does not make the remark in propriâ personâ, but puts it into the mouth of his learned Chinese, Lien Chi Altanghi. It would hardly be more unfair to say that Addison imagined that St. Paul's had been hollowed out of a mountain. The mention of Drayton suggests the propriety of quoting his eloquent lines:

"Next Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs,

Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a Poet's brain."

baptism* of "Phineas Pett, son of Peter Pett," on the 8th of November, 1570, and the burial of "Mr. Ephraim Paget, Rector of St. Edmund, Lombard Street ;" the interment, also, on the 26th of August, 1631, of "William Shewers and John Finicke, two children, which, playing together, shut themselves into a hutch and were smothered." If Mr. Lysons, therefore, had ever heard our poet's name, it is certain that the fact of his being slain by Francis Archer would have found a niche in his Environs. He has, however, preserved one item which in a manner connects itself indirectly with our subject. When Captain Pearse and Lieut. Logan were interred in the churchyard of St. Nicholas after being "shot to death for losing the Saphire cowardly;" we may be sure they were laid in the same dark corner which contained the dust of Marlowe.

66

وو

The dagger of Francis Archer averted one trouble which was hanging ominously over his victim's head. A very few days before the poet's death a "note of his "damnable opinions and judgment of religion, and scorn of God's work," had been laid before Elizabeth's council, with a view to the institution of proceedings against him. These charges, it is to be observed, were drawn up by one Richard Bames or Bame, who was himself hanged at Tyburn in the course of the following year for some degrading offence; and they besides include matter, such as that about coining, which could never have been seriously spoken by any man of ordinary common sense. As authority, therefore, they are of themselves utterly worthless; but, even supposing the whole of them to be the clumsy fabrication of a scoundrelly professional informer, there is no smoke without fire, and the man who could thus be charged must have been well known as a free thinker and reckless speaker. In the present day the speculations, after being purged of grossness and manifest exaggerations, would not, in their general scope, appear novelties to any bearded man who did not chance to be a 'great arithmetician" suddenly converted into a South African bishop; but in the Tudor times they found no being, certainly no utterance, save among such intellectual Bohemians as formed the Greene and Marlowe circle. When the latter commenced his career one of the great turning-points of English history was about to commence. The Queen of Scots was put to death, and the Armada destroyed; and the common dread of Spanish conquest and Papal tyranny being for ever removed, the Englishmen who had merely drifted away from Catholicism, and the Englishmen who had become Protestants from conviction, having no longer occasion to stand side by side, had for the first time leisure to look each other in the face, and to recognise the full extent of the gulf which separated them. Elizabeth at this moment held such a commanding position in the hearts of her people that it was quite in her power to have bridged over this chasm of differences, and to have become the founder of a really national Church. Not only did she neglect this opportunity, but, by following the bent of her own, and her father's Fidei Defensor inclinations, she drove the Puritans into a position where nothing was left for earnest men but to close their ranks and withdraw themselves farther than ever from their opponents. Happily the vigorous rule of

* I have merely selected this entry on account of its early date. This fine old family of master shipwrights were among the most faithful servants of their country for fully a hundred years.

the great queen, and the affection which they bore to her, put actual warfare out of the question; and, till other times arrived, broadsides and pamphlets were the only vents left for their bitterness. I have entered upon this digression to show the exceptional circumstances under which Marlowe's personal character has been handed down to us in the writings of the Puritan pamphleteers and balladmongers, and the many grains of salt which must in fairness be employed to qualify their descriptions. Stage plays and bear-baitings and holidays had never been favourites with the stricter Protestants ; but about this time they began to single them out as the most particular manifestations of the presence of Satan amongst us; and the awfully sudden death of so eminent a man as Marlowe, in the very flower of his manhood, following, as it did, so closely upon the miserable ending of Robert Greene, may well have tended to confirm the belief. And, even in our own time, the daring sentiments which it was necessary to put into the mouth of Faustus, nay, the mere selection of such a subject for a drama, have been held by many to justify the description which had then been given of his opinions. Even so gentle a critic as Charles Lamb gives a certain amount of countenance to the idea.

"The growing horrors of Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and bloody sweat. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go; to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in; to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge. Barabas the Jew and Faustus the conjuror are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting in the mouth of a character, though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it blameable to counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice in upon the stage speaking her own dialect, and themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be death to others. Milton, in the person of Satan, has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury of the atheist ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has strengthened Vice from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries, and abstruse pleas against her adversary, Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism sufficient to have invented."

It only remains to speak of some of the minor productions which go to make up this volume, and which we may suppose to have been the mere sweepings found in his desk after the tragedy at Deptford. The translation, line for line, and in rhyme, of Ovid's Elegies, was in all probability executed in his Cambridge days, an dalmost as a tour de force. Some years after his death the bishops fixed upon it as a proper sacrifice to be burned by the common hangman; but although perhaps the object was to heap further discredit on the name of Marlowe, and through him on the Stage, it must be remembered that the publication was no doing of his own, and that the ideas

are the property of Ovid. A much better plea might easily be set up for him than Dryden, a century later, with all his ingenuity, was able to offer for a similar offence.* The charming verses, The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, must also have been an early production. They are quoted by Marlowe himself in The Jew of Malta (p. 110a), and no doubt suggested to Shakspeare the affectionate name of "dead Shepherd under which he apostrophizes him in As You Like it. Mr. Campbell, one of the most fastidious of critics, says very truly of this song that it "combines a sweet wild spirit with an exquisite finish of expression." This delightful combination again appears in the beautiful lines called A Fragment (p. 274) in reading which the blindest eye must see the sun flickering through the leaves and the dullest ear recognise the sound of the crystal stream singing among the pebbles. In the translation of the First Book of Lucan blank verse was happily chosen instead of rhyme as in the Ovid, and the result has been the occurrence every here and there of one of those "mighty lines" of which the mightiest might be proud. At page 285 they will be found in a cluster, and the description of the supernatural appearances which followed the passage of the Rubico, must have been lingering in the memory of Shakspeare when he penned two of his noblest passages. How still grander might Marlowe here have shown himself had he not been dancing in the self-imposed fetters of a line-for-line translation.

It would be unpardonable to close any notice of Marlowe without adverting to the great loss which the cause of old English literature-has recently suffered by the death of the Rev. Alexander Dyce. No person who has not had occasion to compare the Edition of Marlowe's Works in 3 vols. 8vo., published by Mr. Pickering, in 1826, under the editorship of Mr. Dickinson, with those which Mr. Dyce issued in 1850 and 1865, can appreciate the immense labour which he must have bestowed upon his task If I have differed from him now and then in the course of the notes at the end of this volume, I have never done so but with the most unfeigned diffidence in the value of my own opinion, and the most genuine respect for his acquirements as a scholar and a critic, and regard for his memory as a gentleman and a friend.

"I can less easily answer why I translated it than why I thus translated it. The objection arises from the obscenity of the subject, which is aggravated by the too lively and alluring delicacy of the verses. In the first place, without the least formality of an excuse, I own it pleased me, and let my enemies make the worst they can of this confession; I am not yet so secure from that passion, but that I want my author's antidotes against it. He has given the truest and most philosophical account both of the disease and remedy which I ever found in any author: for which reasons I translated him. But it will be asked why I turned him into this luscious English (for I will not give it a worse word)? Instead of an answer, I would ask again of my supercilious adversaries, whether I am not bound when I translate an author to do him all the right I can, and to translate hir to the best advantage If nothing of this kind be to be read, physicians must not study nature, anatomies must not be seen, and somewhat I could say of particular passages in books, which, to avoid profaneness, I do not name."-Preface to Sylva, or the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies. 1685.

THE PROLOGUE.

FROM jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine :
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortune as you please.