cks on filthy deeds.

We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping
on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the
lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer
us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust,
not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant
attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or
social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of
affectation or of self-indulgence. His real interest and his real
sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and
manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and
awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch
of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued
simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever
enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd
mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which
is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of
the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as
a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with
the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the
two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in
"Parasitaster" and "The Dutch Courtesan," a general defect in his
unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter
violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the
work of a professional and practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly
described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and slovenly are not the
same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence. I have
already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at
being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and
punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any
chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather,
we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the
pefunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the
time employed. Now and then, however--or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say once or twice--a gayer note is struck with a lighter
touch than usual: as, for instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put
into the mouth of an id