a dozen scenes in _Macbeth_, any one of which
has more of the terrific than the whole body of _Faustus_. And in the
death-scene of Edward, it can hardly be denied that the senses are
somewhat overcrammed with images of physical suffering, so as to give
the effect rather of the horrible than the terrible.

Others, again, have thought that Marlowe, if he had lived, would have
made some good approach to Shakespeare in tragic power. A few years
more would no doubt have lifted him to very noble things, that is,
provided his powers could have been kept from the eatings and
cripplings of debauchery; still, any approach to that great Divinity
of the Drama was out of the question for him. For, judging from his
life and works, the moral part of genius was constitutionally
defective in him; and, with this so defective, the intellectual part
cannot be truly itself; and his work must needs be comparatively weak
in those points of our being which it touches, because it does not
touch them all: for the whole must be moved at once, else there can be
no great moving of any part. No, no! there was not, there could not
have been in Marlowe, great as he was, a tithe of Shakespeare, for
tragedy, nor any thing else. To go no further, he was, as we have
seen, destitute of humour; the powers of comedy evidently had no place
in him; and these powers are indispensable to the production of high
tragedy: a position affirmed as long ago as the days of Plato; sound
in the reason of the thing; and, above all, made good in the instance
of Shakespeare; who was _Shakespeare_, mainly because he had _all_ the
powers of the human mind in harmonious order and action, and _used_
them all, explicitly or implicitly, in every play he wrote.

* * * * *

Shakespeare had one or two other senior contemporaries of whom I must
say a few words, though it is not likely that they contributed much,
if any thing, towards preparing him. John Lily, born in 1554, and
Master of Arts in 1576, has considerable wit, some poetry; withal a
certain crisp, clever, conceited mannerism of style, which caused him
to be spoken of as "eloquent and witty"; but nothing that can be
properly termed dramatic talent. His persons all speak in precisely
the same vein, being indeed but so many empty figures or puppets,
reflecting or propagating the motions of the author himself. His
dramatic pieces, of which we have nine, seven in prose, one in rhyme,
and one in