r is obviously an effusion and an example of the
same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance
in other contemporary protests of the universities against the universe.
In that abyss of dulness "The Return from Parnassus," a reader or a
diver who persists in his thankless toil will discover this pearl of a
fact--that men of culture had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to
Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron to Shelley. The author of
the one deserves to have been the author of the other. Nobody can have
been by nature such a fool as to write either: art, education,
industry, and study were needful to achieve such composite perfection of
elaborate and consummate idiocy.

There is a good deal of bad rubbish, and there is some really brilliant
and vigorous writing, in the absurdly named and absurdly constructed
comedy of "Jack Drum's Entertainment"; but in all other points--in plot,
incident, and presentation of character--it is so scandalously beneath
contempt that I am sorry to recognize the hand of Marston in a play
which introduces us to a "noble father," the model of knightly manhood
and refined good sense, who on the news of a beloved daughter's
disappearance instantly proposes to console himself with a heavy
drinking-bout. No graver censure can be passed on the conduct of the
drama than the admission that this monstrous absurdity is not out of
keeping with the rest of it. There is hardly a single character in all
its rabble rout of lunatics who behaves otherwise than would beseem a
probationary candidate for Bedlam. Yet I fear there is more serious
evidence of a circumstantial kind in favor of the theory which would
saddle the fame of Marston with the charge of its authorship than such
as depends on peculiarities of metre and eccentricities of phrase. Some
other poet--though I know of none such--may have accepted and adopted
his theory that "vengeance" must count in verse as a word of three
syllables: I can hardly believe that the fancy would sound sweet in any
second man's ear: but this speciality is not more characteristic than
other and more important qualities of style--the peculiar abruptness,
the peculiar inflation, the peculiar crudity--which denote this comedy
as apparently if not evidently Marstonian. On the other hand, if it were
indeed his, it is impossible to conjecture why his name should have been
withheld from the title-page; and it must not be forgotten that e