He lacked Marlowe's sensitive ear, his joy in the roll of golden periods. But his dialogue, at its best, has the quality of passionate directness and simplicity essential to the highest dramatic achievement. The love-scenes, short as they are, between Belimperia and Horatio touch a responsive chord in our hearts, and the mingled agony and rage of Hieronimo are rendered with masterly power. In this complex delineation of character Kyd made a notable step forward, and he may justly claim to be the pioneer of introspective tragedy in England. Yet the moral basis of the play is crude in the extreme. A wild insatiable fury of revenge is the sole animating impulse of all the chief personages, and suffices to condone every atrocity, even the murder of the innocent Duke of Castile. But, in spite of defects, "The Spanish Tragedy" is an organic creation, and fully deserved its widespread influence. It holds a unique place in dramatic literature, reaching back to "Gorboduc," and forward to Shakspere's early plays, probably even to "Hamlet" and "King Lear."-BOAS, FREDERICK S., 1896, Shakspere and his Predecessors, p. 65.

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Kyd is a sort of English Lazare de Baïf, the choragus who directed the dramatists and led them off. His early plays have disappeared, and Kyd's archaic. "Spanish Tragedy," acted in 1587, shows him still in the trammels of pseudoclassicism. This fierce play, nevertheless, is pervaded by a wild wind of romantic. frenzy which marks an epoch in English drama.-GOSSE, drama. GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 97.

Kyd's style in the "Spanish Tragedy" is indeed made up of the more vulgar elements in Seneca's and Marlowe's plays, without the intellectual quality that distinguishes either. From Seneca he borrows ghosts and "sentences"; Marlowe provides him with precedents of rant and bloodshed. By the help of these hints, Kyd managed to put together a tragedy utterly devoid of any true tragic motive, but not wanting in striking scenes and melodramatic effects, and acceptable accordingly to that public taste which is always caught by loud noise and glaring colours. The "Spanish Tragedy" is, I think, plainly written in emulation of Marlowe's "Jew of Malta." Like that

tragedy it represents an action of coldblooded murder followed by a sanguinary revenge. But whereas Marlowe gives a certain intellectual interest to his play, by making the Jew the victim of injustice in a situation contrived with great force and probability, Kyd is utterly unable to produce such a complication among his dramatis persona as shall prepare the way for the denouement he has imagined.COURTHOPE, W. J., 1897, A History of English Poetry, vol. II, p. 424.

GENERAL

Sporting Kyd.-JONSON, BEN, 1623, To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.

A writer that seems to have been of pretty good esteem for versifying in former times, being quoted amongst some. of the more fam'd poets, as Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, Lodge, &c. with whom he was either cotemporary or not much later. There is particularly remembered his tragedy "Cornelia."-PHILLIPS, EDWARD, 1675, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, ed. Brydges, p. 205.

His Tragedies with those of Rotrou, Serre, and others of that time, are of a mean Character. 'Tis evident to any that have read his Tragedies, which are Nine in Number, that he propos'd Seneca for his Model, and he was thought in those days to have happily succeeded in his Design. This Translation is writ in blank Verse, only here and there, at the close of a Paragraph (if I may so speak) the Reader is presented with a Couplet. The Chorus's are writ in several Measures of Verse, and are very sententious.-LANGBAINE, GERARD, 1691, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, p. 316.

Kyd's bombast was proverbial in his own day. With him the genius of tragedy might be said to have run mad.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, An Essay on English Poetry.

Kyd was a poet of very considerable mind, and deserves, in some respects, to be ranked above more notorious contemporaries his thoughts are often both new and natural; and if in his plays he dealt largely in blood and death, he only partook of the habit of the time, in which good sense and discretion were often outraged for the purpose of gratifying the crowd. In taste he is inferior to Peele, but in

force and character he is his superior; and if Kyd's blank-verse be not quite so smooth, it has decidedly more spirit, vigour, and variety. As a writer of blankverse, I am inclined, among the predecessors of Shakespeare, to give Kyd the next place to Marlow.-COLLIER, JOHN PAYNE, 1831, History of English Dramatic Poetry, vol. III, p. 207.

Kyd was a dramatist of high capabilities in both construction and expression. Not that he is evenly excellent in either; but he is able to exhibit the operation of incidents upon character, and to depict with real force the workings of passion deeply moved. Herein lies the vast difference between him and the authors of "Gorboduc."-WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1875, A History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. 1, p. 172.

Kyd is the merest nominis umbra of English letters; we hardly know anything of the author of "The Spanish Tragedy, perhaps of Jeronimo itself, and of Cornelia, except that he existed and was sportively called "sporting."--SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 64.

Kyd's services to English tragedy were, we think, more important than is commonly supposed. He stands midway between two great schools; between the literary and academic school on the one hand, and the domestic and realistic school on the other. Regarded superficially, he might perhaps be confounded with. a mere copyist of Italian models. And yet, with all this, the impression which his plays make on us is very different

from the impression made on us by the Italian tragedies. Nor is it difficult to explain the reason. The canvas of Kyd is more crowded; his touch is broader and bolder, his colour fuller and deeper; his action is infinitely more diversified, animated, and rapid; his characters are more human; he has more passion, he has more pathos. If he aims too much at sensational effects, he is sometimes simple and natural.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1895, Essays and Studies, p. 180.

Thomas Kyd a satellite of Shakspere. A few years ago the world was startled by the splendid discovery that the mightiest of the planets had a fifth satellite. Four of them had been well known for centuries and had had a glorious place in the history of the stars and light; but the one vassal nearest to his king had been so outshone by the grand luminary that, down to our own day, it had been eclipsed to the eyes of man. Very similar is the case of the nearest vassal of another Jupiter, the Jupiter Tonitruans of the world's drama. Of his satellites, too, some four had been well known for as many centuries: one especially had, by his own brilliancy and fiery appearance, attracted the general eye; but in this case, too, the satellite nearest to the great luminary had hardly been taken notice of. And if we knew of his bare existence, we knew little or nothing of his orbit, of his history, of his magnitude, of the quality of his light-in short, nothing of all the details we care to know of poet or brilliant star.-SCHICK, J., 1898, ed. The Spanish Tragedy, Preface, p. vi.

PERSONAL

Excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.GERARD, FATHER, 1585, The Condition of Catholics under James I., Father Gerard's Narrative.

Robert Southwel was born in this County*, as Pitseus affirmeth, who, although often mistaken in his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born; seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many Books in Verse and Prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the State, for which he was imprisoned, and executed, March the 3d, 1595.-FULLER, THOMAS, 1662, The Worthies of England, ed. Nichols, vol. II, p. 344.

Southwell appears to have been a man of a most gentle disposition, and his poetry was long held in high esteem among his co-religionists, associated as it was with the memory of a man to murder whom at Tyburn was as horrible as it would have been to have treated Cowper, or Kirke White, or Robert Burns after the same manner, because they happened to be Protestants. The execution of Southwell was, besides this, a political blunder. He was no conspirator against the State, and consequently was made a martyr to his faith.-BELLEW, J. C. M., 1868, Poets' Corner, p. 92.

ST. PETER'S COMPLAINT Never must be forgotten "St. Peter's Complaint" and those other serious poems, said to be father Southwell's; the English whereof, as it is most proper, so the sharpness and light of wit is very rare in them.-BOLTON, EDMUND, 1624, Hyper

critica.

Southwell's poetry wears a deep tinge of gloom, which seems to presage a catastrophe too usual to have been unexpected. --HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. ii, ch. v, par. 65.

His longest poem is "Saint Peter's Complaint," and is strongly religious, though often its strength is at the expense of its verse. It is generally harsh in its construction, and lacks the sweet flow and the noble ring which frequently marks the efforts of contemporary poets.

*Suffolk.

It is direct; full of a fierce energy which is out of keeping with the character of the Apostle whose complaint it professes to be. It is finely exaggerated, and deals in hyperbole to an extraordinary extent. Perhaps the occasion justifies this.LANGFORD, JOHN ALFRED, 1861, Prison Books and their Authors, p. 142.

Perhaps its chief fault is that the pauses are so measured with the lines as to make every line almost a sentence, the effect of which is a considerable degree of monotony.-MACDONALD, GEORGE, 1868, England's Antiphon, p. 97.

His poems show a true poetic power. They show a rich and fertile fancy, with an abundant store of effective expression at its service. He inclines to sententiousness; but his sentences are no mere prose edicts, as is so often the case with writers of that sort; they are bright and coloured with the light and the hues of a vivid. imagination. In imagery, indeed, he is singularly opulent. In this respect "St. Peter's Complaint" reminds one curiously of the almost exactly contemporary poem, Shakespeare's "Lucrece." There is a like inexhaustibleness of illustrative resource. He delights to heap up metaphor on metaphor. It is undoubtedly the work of a mind of no ordinary copiousness and force, often embarrassed by its own riches, and so expending them with a prodigal carelessness. Thus Southwell's defects spring not from poverty, but from imperfectly managed wealth; or, to use a different image, the flowers are overcrowded in his garden, and the blaze of colour is excessive. Still, flowers they are. Like many another Elizabethan, he was wanting in art; his genius ran riot.-HALES, JOHN W., 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. 1, pp. 480, 481.

GENERAL

That Southwell was hanged; yet so he had written that piece of his, the "Burning Babe," he would have been content to destroy many of his.-DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, 1619, Notes on Ben Jonson's Conversations, ed. Laing, p. 13.

Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination

resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1817, Shakspeare and his Times, vol. I, p. 645.

His verses are ingenious, simpler in style than was common in his time-distinguished here by homely picturesqueness, and there by solemn moralising. A shade of deep but serene and unrepining sadness, connected partly with his position and partly with his foreseen destiny, (his larger works were written in prison,) rests on the most of his poems. — GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1860, Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-Known British Poets, vol. I, p. 118.

Southwell, it seems, was the founder of the modern English style of religious. poetry; his influence and example are evident in the work of Crashaw, or of Donne, or of Herbert, or Waller, or any of those whose devout lyrics were admired in later times.-ARNOLD, THOMAS, 186287, A Manual of English Literature, American ed., p. 84.

He shows in his poetry great simplicity and elegance of thought, and still greater purity of language. He has been compared in some of his pieces to Goldsmith, and the comparison seems not unjust. There is in both the same naturalness of sentiment, the same propriety of expression, and the same ease and harmony of versification; while there is a force and compactness of thought, with occasional quaintness not often found in the more modern poet.ANGUS, JOSEPH, 1865, Handbook of English Literature, p. 155.

He paraphrases David, putting into his mouth such punning conceits as "fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of

martyrs. LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 185864-90, Library of Old Authors, Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. 1, p. 253.

The hastiest reader will come on "thinking" and "feeling" that are as musical as Apollo's lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally) is throughout of the "pure well of English undefiled." When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, their élan their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener's flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the "dew of the morning." His smilesfor he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o' mouth- are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. -GROSART, ALEXANDER B., 1872, ed. The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, Fuller Worthies' Library.

To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of