licon; snatches of it are sung by Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor;* and Donne† and Herrick have each (unsuccessfully) attempted to rival it. In 1653, when it was comparatively little known, Isaac Walton, by inserting it in The Complete Angler, gave it fresh celebrity. -Making no appeal to the heart, nor having any force of sentiment, it cannot be regarded as a love-song of the highest class; but it is among the very best of those sweet and fanciful strains with which genius has enriched the fabled Arcadia.

As the editor of England's Parnassus, 1600, appears never to have resorted to manuscript sources, we may conclude that the descriptive stanzas by Marlowe in that anthology, “I walk'd along a stream," &c, were extracted from some printed piece, of which not a single copy now remains.

Dram. Poets, says; "Sr W. Ralegh was an encourager of his [Marlowe's] Muse; and he wrote an answer to a Pastoral Sonnet of Sr Walters printed by Isaac Walton in his Book of Fishing. For the first of these statements I know no authority; as to the second, "Sir Walters" is obviously a slip of the pen for "Marlowe's."

"

* Act iii. sc. 1.-In Malone's Shakespeare (by Boswell), viii. 104, may be seen the old music to which it was sung, given from a MS. by Sir J. Hawkins.-N. Breton mentions this song in A Poste with a Packet of Mad Letters, 1603; "At the least you shall heare the old song that you were wont to like well of, sung by the blacke browes with the cherrie-cheeke, vnder the side of the pide cow, Come liue with me and be my love." p. 59, ed. 1637.—Again, in his Choice, Chance, and Change, &c, 1606; Why, how now, doe you take me for a woman, that you come vpon me with a ballad of Come liue with me and be my loue?" p. 3.-In Deloney's Strange Histories, &c, 1607, is a ballad called The Imprisonment of Queene Elinor, &c, "to the tune of Come liue with me and be my loue."

+ See Donne's Poems, p. 190, ed. 1633. In later eds. it is entitled The Bait.

See To Phillis to love and live with him, Herrick's Hesperides, p. 223, ed. 1648.

Most probably it was a composition of no great length: but the stanzas in question present so fine a picture of objects seen through a poetic medium, that, in exchange for the rest, every reader of taste would willingly part with a dozen of those long and tedious productions which are precious in the estimation of antiquaries alone.

A comedy called The Maiden's Holiday was entered in the Stationers' Books, 8th April 1654, as the joint-work of Marlowe and Day; but it did not reach the press; and at last it met its fate from that arch-destroyer of manuscript dramas, John Warburton's cook. In matters of authorship the Stationers' Books are not always to be trusted; and that Marlowe and Day should have written in conjunction is rendered highly improbable by the fact, that we find no notice of Day as a dramatist earlier than 1599. Still, there is a possibility that Marlowe may have so far mistaken his own powers as to attempt a comedy, that he may have left it unfinished at his death, and that Day may have completed it there is a possibility too that we possess a fragment of The Maiden's Holiday in that pastoral " Dialogue attributed to "Kitt Marlowe ", which was recently discovered among the Alleyn Papers, and which, mean as it is, I have not chosen to exclude from the present edition.

Lusts Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen. A Tragedie. Written by Christofer Marloe, Gent., was issued from the shop of Kirkman in 1657; but that it could not have been the work of Marlowe has been distinctly shown by Mr. Collier; who also conjectures with great probability, that,

*«This play, Lust's Dominion, though hitherto supposed to have been written by Marlow, is unquestionably not his. Some confusion is occasioned in the plot by the insertion of characters unknown to history; but the King Philip who figures in the first act is Philip ii. of Spain, who did not die (vide Watson's Philip ii, vol. II. p. 332) until 1598. Marlow was killed by Archer in 1593. If this be not sufficient, or if it should be

as a Spanish Moor is its hero, it is no other than The Spaneshe Mores Tragedie, which was written by Dekker, Haughton, and Day, and is mentioned in Henslowe's Diary under "the 13 of febrearye 1599 [-1600]."*

It is now necessary to consider a remarkable passage† of Greene's Address to Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, which has been already cited from The Groatsworth of Wit. "There

66

is," he says, and that he is speaking of Shakespeare no one can hesitate to believe, an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hyde,

supposed for a moment that Philip i. might be intended, there is still further and conclusive evidence to shew that Marlow could not be the author of Lust's Dominion. A tract was printed in London in 1599 (vide Lord Somers' Collection, ii. 505), called A briefe and true Declaration of the Sicknesse, last words, and Death of the King of Spain, Philip Second, from which various passages in the play were clearly borrowed. We will compare a few quotations from both relating to the death of the King.

Dry your wet eyes, for sorrow wanteth force

T'inspire a breathing soul in a dead corse.' Lust's Dom.

My friends and subjects, your sorrowes are of no force to recover my health.' Tract.

I when I am embalm'd, Apparel me in a rich royal robe....

Then place my bones within that brazen shrine.' Lust's Dom. Commanding that this my bodie.... be embalm'd; then apparelled with a royal robe, and so placed within this brazen shrine.' Tract.

Have care to Isabel:

Her virtue was King Philip's looking-glass.' Lust's Dom.

'I pray you, have a great care and regard to your sister, be cause she was my looking-glasse.' Tract." Note in Dodsley's Old Plays, ii. 311, ed. 1825.

* P. 165, ed. Shake. Soc. + See p. xxviii.

supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you," &c. Hence it is evident that before September 1592 Shakespeare had re-modelled certain pieces written, either separately or conjointly, by Greene, Marlowe, Lodge, or Peele. It would seem, too, that, while accusing our great dramatist of having adorned himself with borrowed plumes, Greene more particularly alludes to the two old "histories entitled The First Part of the Contention of the two famous houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, on which Shakespeare is known to have founded The Second and Third Parts of Henry the Sixth; for the words, " his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hyde," are parodied from a line in The True Tragedie,

I

"Oh, tygers hart wrapt in a womans hide."
Sig. B 2, ed. 1595.

say that Greene seems to allude to both these elder dramas, because hardly a shadow of doubt can be entertained that they were written by the same poet or poets.

To The First Part of the Contention and to The True Tragedie Greene may have contributed his share; so also may Lodge, and so may Peele have done: but in both pieces there are scenes characterised by a vigour of conception and expression, to which, as their undisputed works demonstratively prove, neither Greene, nor Lodge, nor Peele could possibly have risen. Surely, therefore, we have full warrant for supposing that Marlowe* was largely concerned

* Malone, who had at first conjectured either that Greene and Peele were the joint-authors of these two pieces, or that Greene wrote the one and Peele the other, - was afterwards "inclined to believe that Marlowe was the author of one, if not of both." Shakespeare, by Boswell, ii. 313. - Concerning the authorship of The First Part of the Contention, Mr. Collier, Shakespeare, v. 107, merely says," By whom it was written we have no information;" but in the Hist. of the English Stage, prefixed to his Shakespeare, p. xlix, he states that "there is much

in the composition of The First Part of the Contention and of The True Tragedie; and the following instances of their

reason to suppose Greene had been concerned " in it as well as in the other play. On The True Tragedie he has the following observations. "Although there is no ground whatever for giving it to Marlowe, there is some reason for supposing that it came from the pen of Robert Greene Although

Greene talks of an upstart crow beautified with our feathers,' he seems to have referred principally to his own works, and to the manner in which Shakespeare had availed himself of them. This opinion is somewhat confirmed by two lines in a tract called Greene's Funerals' by R. B., 1594, where the writer is adverting to the obligations of other authors to Greene;—

Nay, more, the men that so eclips'd his fame,
Purloin'd his plumes—can they deny the same?'

Here R. B. nearly adopts Greene's words, beautified with our feathers,' and applies to him individually what Greene, perhaps to avoid the charge of egotism and vanity, had stated more generally. Another fact tends to the same conclusion: it is a striking coincidence between a passage in The True Tragedy and some lines in one of Greene's acknowledged dramas, Alphonsus, King of Arragon'. . . . In 'Alphonsus the hero kills Flaminius, his enemy, and thus addresses the dying man ;

'Go, pack thee hence,' &c.

And if he ask thee who did send thee down,

Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown.'

In The True Tragedy' Richard, while stabbing Henry VI. a second time, exclaims,

'If any spark of life remain in thee,

Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither.''

Collier's Shakespeare, v. 225-7.— Mr. Hallam remarks; "It seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which Shakespeare remodelled in the second and third parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition ;" and in a note he adds; "The bitterness he [Greene] displays must lead us to suspect that he had been