ady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient
in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed,
and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected. There is no
unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often--nay, too
constantly--in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.
What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre
of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and
thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or
to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and
infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place
among the humorists and the poets of his country.

JOHN MARSTON

If justice has never been done, either in his own day or in any after
age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be
presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in
great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be
suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected,
in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will
be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his
spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of
Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and
overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy
for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature
and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so
long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an
independent and remarkable poet. The praise and the blame, the
admiration and the distaste excited by his works, are equally just, but
are seemingly incompatible: the epithets most exactly appropriate to
the style of one scene, one page, one speech in a scene or one passage
in a speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the next. An anthology
of such noble and beautiful excerpts might be collected from his plays,
that the reader who should make his first acquaintance with this poet
through the deceptive means of so flattering an introduction would be
justified in supposing that he had fallen in with a tragic dramatist of
the very highest order--with a new candidate for a station in the very
foremost rank of English poets. And if the evil star which seems
generally to have presided over the lite