ven our
own day is not more fertile than was Marston's in the generation of that
slavish cattle which has always since the age of Horace fed ravenously
and thievishly on the pasture-land of every poet who has discovered or
reclaimed a field or a province of his own.

But our estimate of John Marston's rank or regiment in the noble army of
contemporary poets will not be in any way affected by acceptance or
rejection of any apocryphal addition to the canon of his writings. For
better and for worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them will
suffice to decide that question beyond all chance of intelligent or
rational dispute. His rank is high in his own regiment; and the colonel
of that regiment is Ben Jonson. At first sight he may seem rather to
belong to that brighter and more famous one which has Webster among its
captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Heywood among its privates, and
Shakespeare at its head. Nor did he by any means follow the banner of
Jonson with such automatic fidelity as that imperious martinet of genius
was wont to exact from those who came to be "sealed of the tribe of
Ben." A rigid critic--a critic who should push rigidity to the verge of
injustice--might say that he was one of those recruits in literature
whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools--to halt between two
courses. It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the
cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson. But it is
no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and
the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such
examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with
plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that
line except "Sejanus his Fall" and "Catiline his Conspiracy." It is
superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an achievement only less far out
of his reach than "Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that he
does not deserve an honorable place among English poets. His savage and
unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating
or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious
rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human
utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him
we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more
potent and more truculent satirist:

An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sti