econd; and the death-scene of
Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or
modern with which I am acquainted.

_The Rich Jew of Malta_.--Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to
Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second.
Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to
please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries,
invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as a century
or two earlier might have been played before the Londoners "by the
royal command," when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews
had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see
a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious
ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now
revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails,
and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it;
it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and
is the only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom.

_Doctor Faustus_.--The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene 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 a fearful colluctation. 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.[1] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus
the conjurer, 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 into the mouth of a
character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes
not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of
another, to bring Vice 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 armory of the atheist
ever furnished; and the precise, strait-lace