cellence of various lines and passages in
Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be
allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which
blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts.
With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in
"Tamburlaine the Great"; and for two grave reasons it must always be
remembered with distinction and mentioned with honor. It is the first
poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere
rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest
passages--perhaps, indeed, the noblest in the literature of the
world--ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving
praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the
everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive
qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of
music and the proper tone of color for the finest touches of poetic
execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease
upon every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely
refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a
man who had literally no models before him, and probably or evidently
was often, if not always, compelled to write against time for his
living.

The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the "Faustus" of his
English predecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject is somewhat
more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the sneering
references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from
the ignorance of Byron or the incompetence of Hallam. And the particular
note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by
the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the
vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to
criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a
finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution
as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or
scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in
them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by
Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of "Faust" in the work of
Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author of "Manfred" is
proof enough to consign his best work to the second or third c