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at the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and distinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays. Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the _Second Part of King Henry VI_. are not to be found in the corresponding scene of the first part of the _Contention_; yet, whether they belong to the original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely unmistakable:-- The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day Is crept into the bosom of the sea; And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades That drag the tragic melancholy night-- _Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus_; it is inconceivable that any imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is not the fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist. No parasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds his starveling talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics" of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrot-like note of plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--that in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his manner, may perpetually be traced--I have already shown that I should be the last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as this, I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation of emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of this passage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare's style as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the manner of the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that it is--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this there is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald and flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of stage business
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