"the sum of forty shillings," in
earnest of some work not named. There is an undated letter of Marston to
Henslowe, written probably in reference to this matter, which is
characteristic in its disdainfully confident tone. Thus it runs:--

"MR. HENSLOWE, at the Rose on the Bankside.

"If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well, and you
shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for it, but If
nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as I know the
kinges men will freelie give me as much for it, and the
profitts of the third daye moreover.

"Soe I rest yours,

"JOHN MARSTON."

He seems not to have been popular among the band of dramatists he now
joined, and it is probable that his insulting manners were not sustained
by corresponding courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him, both
literary and personal, and mentions one occasion on which he beat him,
and took away his pistol. His temper was Italian rather than English,
and one would conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the
fist. His connection with the stage ceased in 1613, after he had
produced a number of dramas, of which nine have been preserved. He died
about twenty years afterwards, in 1634, seemingly in comfortable
circumstances.

Marston's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all bear the mark of his
bitter and misanthropic spirit,--a spirit that seemed cursed by the
companionship of its own thoughts, and forced them out through a
well-grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His comedies
of "The Malcontent," "The Fawn," and "What You Will," have no genuine
mirth, though an abundance of scornful wit,--of wit which, in his own
words, "stings, blisters, galls off the skin, with the acrimony of its
sharp quickness." The baser its objects, the brighter its gleam. It is
stimulated by the desire to give pain, rather than the wish to
communicate pleasure. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his
sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though it is
sometimes that of the hyena, and sometimes that of the polecat. In his
Malcontent he probably drew a nattering likeness of his inner self: yet
the most compassionate reader of the play would experience little pity
in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, indeed, of Marston's satire is
directed at depravity, that Ben Jonson used to say that "Marston wrote
his father-in-law's