Be this as it may, the innovation appears to have been hugely successful from the first: Tamburlaine had a sudden. a great, and long-continued popularity. And its success was partly owing, no doubt, to its very faults, forasmuch as the public ear, long used to rhyme, required some compensation in the way of grandiloquent stuffing, which was here supplied in abundance. It was, in short, just the thing to break the thick ice of custom for a new and better dramatic sty e

The scene of these two dramas - and they are two only because too long to be one- takes in the whole period of time from the hero's first conquest till his death; so that the action of course ranges, ad libitum, over divers kingdoms and empires. Except the hero, there is little really deserving the name of characterisation; this being a point of art which Marlowe had not yet begun to reach, and which he rever attained but in a moderate degree, taking Shakespeare as the standard. But the hero is drawn with grand and striking proportions; and perhaps seems the larger, that the bones of his individuality are exaggerated into undue prominence; the author lacking that balance and reciprocity of powers which is required, to maintain the roundness and symmetry met with in all nature's greater productions of life. The following is a description of him, given by one of the other characters:

"Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned,
Like his desire, lift upwards and divine;

So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit,
Such breadth of shoulders, as might mainly bear
Old Atlas' burden: 'twixt his manly pitch,
A pearl more worth than all the world is plac'd,
Wherein, by curious sovereignty of art,
Are fix'd his piercing instruments of sight;
Whose fiery circles bear encompassed

A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres,
That guides his steps and actions to the throne
Where honour sits invested royally:

Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion,
Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms;
His lofty brows in folds do figure death,

And in their smoothness amity and life;
About them bangs a knot of amber hair
Wrapped in curls, as fierce Achilles' was,
On which the breath of heaven delights to play,
Making it dance with wanton majesty:
His arms and fingers long and sinewy,
Betokening valour and excess of strength;-
In every part proportion'd like the man

Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine."

In respect of poetry at least, this is one of the best pas sages, perhaps the best, in the whole performance; which, however, will readily be allowed to leave room for much excellence in others. We must add another spoken by the hero himself to Cosroe, one of his many captive kings:

"The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caus'd the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,
And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
Mov'd me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature, that fram'd us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest,
Until we reap the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown."

And Tamburlaine is represented in action as a most magnanimous prodigy; amidst his haughtiest strides of conquest, we have traits of great gentleness interwoven with his iron sternness everywhere, indeed, he appears lifted high with heroic passions and impulses; if he regards not others, he is equally ready to sacrifice himself, his ease, pleasure, and even life, in his prodigious lust of glory: in which respect his temper is shown by the following from one of his speeches to his three sons:

"But now, my boys, leave off. and list to me,
That mean to teach you rudiments of war.
I'll have you learn to sleep upon the ground,
March in your armour thorough watery fens,
Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold,
Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war;
And, after this, to scale a castle-wall,
Besiege a fort, to undermine a town,

And make whole cities caper in the air."

One other passage we must notice, partly for contributing towards Pistol's vocabulary of fustian, in 2 Henry IV., Act ii. sc. 4. The hero is represented travelling in a chariot drawn by captive kings, and whipping them with his tongue, thus:

Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!

What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day,
And have so proud a chariot at your heels,
And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?
The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven,
And blow the morning from their nostrils,
Making their fiery gait above the clouds,
Are not so honour'd in their governor,
As you, ye slaves, in mighty Tamburlaine.
The headstrong jades of Thrace Alcides tam'd,
That King geus fed with human flesh,

And made so wanton that they knew their strengths,
Were not subdued with valour more divine
Than you by this unconquer'd arm of mine.
To make you fierce, and fit my appetite,
You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood,
And drink in pails the strongest muscadel:
If you can live with it, then live, and draw
My chariot swifter than the racking clouds;
If not, then die like beasts, and fit for nought
But perches for the black and fatal ravens."

It is to be noted, though, that the incident was not original with Marlowe: one of the dumb-shows in Gascoigne's Jocasta, spoken of in the preceding Chapter, has the following: "There came in upon the stage a King with an imperial crown upon his head, a sceptre in his right hand, sitting in a chariot very richly furnished, drawn in by four kings in their doublets and hose, with crowns also upon their heads;

representing unto us Ambition by the history of Sesostris king of Egypt, who did in like manner cause those kings whom he had overcome to draw in his chariot like beasts and oxen."

As to the rest, the drama in hand consists rather of a long series of speeches than any genuine dialogue. The persons all use the style of premeditating speech-makers : of course therefore their speeches all run in much the same vein; and the hero talks just like the others, only a good deal more so; as if the author knew not how to discriminate characters but by different degrees of the same thing. Moreover, the several parts of the work are not moulded up into any thing like artistic wholeness; the materials rather seem tumbled in for stage effect, instead of being selected and assorted on any principle of coherence or congruity. And the piece affects us throughout as a highpitched monotone of superlatives in thought and diction: everywhere we have nearly the same rampant, boisterous extravagance of tragical storm and stress; with no changes of rise and fall, no perspective of objects, that so we may take distinct impressions. We will dismiss the subject with Mr. Dyce's judicious remarks: "With very little discrimination of character, with much extravagance of incident, with no pathos where pathos was to be expected, and with a profusion of inflated language, Tamburlaine is nevertheless a very impressive drama, and undoubtedly superior to all the English tragedies which preceded it ; — superior to them in the effectiveness with which the events are brought out, in the poetic feeling which animates the whole, and in the nerve and variety of the versification."

The Jew of Malta shows very considerable advance towards a chaste and sober diction, but not much either in development of character, or in composition of the parts. Barabas, the Jew, is a horrible monster of wickedness and cunning, yet not without some strong lines of individuality. The author evidently sought to compass the effect of tragedy

by mere accumulation of murders and hellish deeds; which shows that he had no steady idea wherein lies the true secret of tragic terror: he here works on the principle of reaching it by exaggerated impressions of the senses, whereas its proper method stands in the joint working of the moral and imaginative powers; which are rather stifled than kindled by causing the senses to "sup full of horrors." The versification is far more varied, compact, and light-flashing, than in Tamburlaine: the piece abounds in quick and caustic wit; in some parts, there is a good share of genuine dialogue as distinguished from speech-making; now and then the movement becomes almost intensely dramatic, the speakers striking fire out of each other by their sharp collisions of thought, so that their words relish of the individuality of both the person speaking and the person spoken to. Still, as a whole, the piece shows but little that can properly be called dramatic power, as distinguished from the general powers of rhetoric and wit.

Mr. Dyce, after remarking that the interest of the play depends entirely on the character of Barabas, and that this part is a good deal overcharged, adds the following: "But I suspect that, in this instance at least, Marlowe violated the truth of nature, not so much from his love of exaggeration, as in consequence of having borrowed all the atrocities of the play from some now-unknown novel, whose author was willing to flatter the prejudices of his readers by attributing almost impossible wickedness to a son of Israel. — That Shakespeare was well acquainted with this tragedy, cannot be doubted; but that he caught from it more than a few trifling hints for The Merchant of Venice, will be allowed by no one who has carefully compared the character of Barabas with that of Shylock."

Remains but to add that the drama has an allusion which ascertains it to have been written after 1588; that it was not printed till 1633; and that Thomas Heywood, who ther edited it, informs us that the hero's part was originally sustained by Edward Alleyn