pried,
Stuffed noting-books, and still my spaniel slept.
At length he waked and yawned, and by yon sky
For aught I know, he knew as much as I."

[37] Kissed.

There is real pathos in _Antonio and Mellida_, and real satire in
_Parasitaster_ and _The Malcontent_. Hazlitt (who had a very high opinion
of Marston) admits that the remarkable inequalities of this last piece
"seem to show want of interest in the subject." This is an odd explanation,
but I suspect it is really only an anticipation in more favourable words of
my own theory, that Marston's tragic and satiric moods were not really
sincere; that he was a clever man who found a fashion of satire and a
fashion of blood-and-thunder tragedy prevailing, and threw himself into
both without much or any heart in the matter. This is supported by the
curious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) were
produced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirty
years after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last dated
appearances in literature, _The Insatiate Countess_, and _Eastward Ho!_
That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who
succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for _saeva
indignatio_, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a
description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the
time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the
late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy,"
mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of
his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved
marionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them,
I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very different
estimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in which
the same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely to
look at them from very different points of view.

Marston's plays, however, are both powerful enough and famous enough to
call for a somewhat more detailed notice. _Antonio and Mellida_, the
earliest and if not the best as a whole, that which contains the finest
scenes and fragments, is in two parts--the second being more properly
called _The Revenge of Antonio_. The revenge itself is of the exaggerated
character which was so popular with the Elizabethan dramatists, but in
which (