gations, we owe the
discovery of a striking passage excised in the piratical edition which
gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play; and which, it
must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is
obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is
overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical
quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That
anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged
chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen
Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to
conjecture what it would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in
the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really
admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after
the death of Marlowe.

The tragedy of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," was probably completed for the
stage after that irreparable and incalculable loss to English letters by
Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure,
and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities
of a personal and social satirist; a man gifted also with some fair
faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put
on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as
Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from
among the worthiest of his fellows. In this somewhat thin-spun and
evidently hasty play a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's
narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been
expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially
inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of
dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble
and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the
unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious
in their subservience.

It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon
cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best
in the serious scenes of "King Henry VI." is mainly the work of Marlowe.
That he is, at any rate, the principal author of the second and third
plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first
and imperfectly printed as "The Contention between the two Famous Houses
of York and Lancaste