enriched, and gorgeously invested with rare ornaments, and resplendent habiliments, the English tongue." Carew couples his name with that of Shakspeare in the following passage of his "Excellencies of the English tongue :" "Would you read Catullus, take Shakspeare's and Marlow's fragments:" and Nashe, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaking of Hero and Leander, says, "of whom divine Musæus sung, and a diviner muse than he, Kit Marlow." George Peele, in his "Honour of the Garter," thus mentions him:

"Unhappy in thy end,

Marlow, the Muses' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below."

Henry Petowe published what he calls a second part of the Hero and Leander, in 1598, and in the following passages exceeds all his eulogists in panegyric, though his verses are homely.

"Marlow admir'd, whose honey-flowing vein
No English writer can as yet attain.
Whose name, in Fame's immortal treasury,
Truth shall record to endless memory.

Marlow, late mortal, now framed all divine,

What soul more happy, than this soul of thine?
Live still in Heaven thy soul, thy fame on earth."-

And again,

"What mortal soul with Marlow might contend,
That could, 'gainst reason, force him stoop or bend?
Whose silver charming tongue mov'd such delight,
That men would shun their sleep, in still dark night,
To meditate upon his golden lines,

His rare conceits, and sweet according rhymes.
But Marlow--still admired Marlow's gone,
To live with Beauty in Elizium,

Immortal Beauty! who desires to hear

His sacred poesies, sweet in every ear:
Marlow must frame, to Orpheus' melody,
Hymns all divine to make Heaven harmony;
There ever live the prince of poetry,

Live with the living in eternity."

The reader must be familiar with Ben Jonson's mention of "Marlow's mighty line," in his poem to the memory of Shakspeare: and with Drayton's verses, which Warton well observes, are "the highest testimony," because "Drayton from his own feelings was well qualified to decide on the merits of a poet."

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"Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That your first poets had: his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

Decker, in one of his tracts *, has placed Marlow in the Elisian Grove of Baies, "with Greene and Peele, under the shadow of a large vine." In that curious old comedy, "The Returne from Pernassus," is the following passage:

"Marlow was happy in his buskin'd Muse, Alas! unhappy in his life and end:

Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell,

Wit lent from Heaven, but vices sent from Hell."

It should seem that Marlow on his first launching into life pursued the same thoughtless career of dissipation, which it is to be feared was too prevalent with the men of wit and genius at that period; his associates were Nashe, and Greene, and Peele, dangerous companions-from the fascination of their society and the freedom of

* A Knight's Conjuring, 1607, 4to. sig. L.

their lives; and all of them at mortal enmity with the Puritanical Precisians. Free-thinking on religious topics was then, as it has been deemed since, a mark of the man of spirit and of the world,-a fashionable vice. It may be remarked, that more heterodoxical books were then printed in England than in any other part of Europe; the works of Giordano Bruno, and Servetus, with others of the same stamp, first issued into light from the London press, under the countenance of men of eminence for their rank and talent in the court of Elizabeth.

It is possible, though the evidence is equivocal, that Marlow may have been led by the influence of evil example, in thoughtlessness and gaiety of spirits to sport with sacred subjects; more perhaps from the preposterous ambition of courting the casual applause of profligate and unprincipled companions, than from any systematic disbelief of religion," he may have ventured upon

"Unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits:"

but it should be remarked that his accusers were the Puritans, the inveterate enemies of stageplayers and poets; and that Marlow seems to have aimed a blow at them in his Edward the Second, where young Spencer addressing the scholar Baldock ridicules the hypocritical pedant, who says a long grace at the table's end, wears a little band, buttons like pins heads, and

is

"Curate-like, in his attire,

Though inwardly licentious enough."

This would never be forgiven or forgotten, his ridicule of their sacred persons would render him more obnoxious than absolute Atheism. Accordingly the fanatic Thomas Beard, in his "Theatre of God's Judgments"," gladly avails himself of the unfortunate catastrophe of Marlow's untimely death, to show that it was an immediate judgment of Heaven. He represents him as "giving too large a swing to his own wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reins, so that he fell to that outrage and extremity, as Jodelle

*Printed about 1598.