as we
think is hardly paralleled in the whole range of the Elizabethan drama.
The passions of this brute imp are not human. They are such as might be
conceived of as springing from the union of animal with fiendish
impulses, in a nature which knew no law outside of its own lust, and was
as incapable of a scruple as of a sympathy.

But of all the dramatists of the time, the most disagreeable in
disposition, though by no means the least powerful in mind, was John
Marston. The time of his birth is not known; his name is entangled in
contemporary records with that of another John Marston; and we may be
sure that his mischief-loving spirit would have been delighted could he
have anticipated that the antiquaries, a century after his death, would
be driven to despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the
other. It is more than probable, however, that he was the John Marston
who was of a respectable family in Shropshire; who took his bachelor's
degree at Oxford in 1592; and who was afterwards married to a daughter
of the chaplain of James the First. Whatever may have been Marston's
antecedents, they were such as to gratify his tastes as a cynical
observer of the crimes and follies of men,--an observer whose hatred of
evil sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and
baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak
his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and
it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy
out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous
satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification,
condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a
caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To
prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put
Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he
soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was
circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop
Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer could not be
thus dishonored without being brought prominently into notice, and old
Henslowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his libellous
ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn from Henslowe's diary, under
date of September 28, 1599, that he had lent to William Borne "to lend
unto John Mastone," "the new poete,"