have been rather
taken in by his blood-and-thunder work, his transpontine declamation
against tyrants, and his affectation of a gloomy or furious scorn against
mankind. The uncouthness, as well as the suspicion of insincerity, which we
noted in his satirical work, extend, as it seems to me, also to his dramas;
and if we class him as a worker in horrors with Marlowe earlier, and with
Webster and Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extreme
inferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, like
Tourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity and
proportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection of
Shakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued through
Fletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the more
artificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of the
First Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at _Jeronimo_,
but his own tragic construction and some of his own tragic scenes are
hardly less bombastic, and scarcely at all less promiscuous than the
tangled horrors of that famous melodrama. Marston, it is true, has lucid
intervals--even many of them. Hazlitt has succeeded in quoting many
beautiful passages, one of which was curiously echoed in the next age by
Nat. Lee, in whom, indeed, there was a strong vein of Elizabethan
melodrama. The sarcasm on philosophical study in _What You Will_ is one of
the very best things of its own kind in the range of English drama,--light,
sustained, not too long nor too short, in fact, thoroughly "hit off."

"_Delight_ my spaniel slept, whilst I baused[37] leaves,
Tossed o'er the dunces, pored on the old print
Of titled words, and still my spaniel slept.
Whilst I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept,
And still I held converse with Zabarell,
Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws
Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept.
Still on went I: first _an sit anima_,
Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold!
At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears,
Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept.
Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed,
_Ex traduce_; but whether 't had free will
Or no, hot philosophers
Stood banding factions all so strongly propped,
I staggered, knew not which was firmer part;
But thought, quoted, read, observed and