cbtaining an extract from the Treasurer's Accounts; and after giving this extract, which proves that Marlowe was a scholar from Michaelmas, 1578, till Michaelmas, 1579,* he goes on to inform us in a note that the accounts for that very year, and the year before and after it, are "wanting"! Beyond the dates in this curiously-derived extract, nothing is known of him until 1580, when, at sixteen years of age, he was entered at Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. The terms in which this entry is made, the bare name Marlin being written without prefix or affix, is conceived to render it "nearly certain" that he had not obtained one of the two scholarships which had recently been founded in this very college for the benefit of the boys of the King's School at Canterbury. But when a biographer is reduced to the dilemma of choosing between two improbabilities, the safest course is to select the lesser; and in the present case there can, I think, be no question that it is less unlikely that a hurried and quasi informal entry has been made in the College books, than that a boy of Marlowe's ability and industry and precocity of intellect should have gone from that particular school to that particular college on any footing but that of a foundation scholar. The matter is of little consequence, except as furnishing a curious instance of the manner in which a "speculative" biography is almost of necessity built up. Two centuries and a half after this entry was made, "a gentleman of Corpus"+ remarks to the Rev. George Skinner that "scholars were entered with a pomp and circumstance not found in the notice of Marlin." He was therefore not a scholar. Two anonymous scribblers in the margins of books had noted that he was the son of a "shoemaker," so the father is at once set down as a cobbler and a pauper, and unable to pay the expenses of a college. Somebody else, therefore, must have paid them, but who could that somebody be? By great good fortune, at the very moment when this question had to be answered, a manuscript copy of a Latin epitaph on a Kentish Squire, with Marlowe's name inscribed on it, turns up, and one Sir Roger Manwood is immediately hailed as the generous and discriminating patron! But although a certain baldness in the wording of the College, entry has thus suggested a doubt; which, if true, demanded an hypothesis; which, if not fulse, required a guess; which if possessing a fragment of a toe to stand upon, was to be recorded as history-the entries in the Records of the University are plain and satisfactory, and refuse to be burdened with any such rickety superstructure. The Matriculation Book tells us that on the 17th of March, 1581,§ when just turned seventeen, he was matriculated as Pensioner of Benet College: the Grace Book adding that he proceeded B.A. 1583, and commenced M.A. 1587. How Marlowe passed the interval between these two degrees it is impossible now to determine. Of his two contemporaries at the University, who grew to distinction in the same literary pursuits, • "The year ending at the Feast of St. Michael, 21st Eliz." + Some Account of Marlowe and his Writings, p. xii. Note. This epitaph was discovered by Mr. Collier, but the strangely ingenious deductions from it were entirely the work of others. § Athena Cantabrigienses, ii. 158. "17 Mar. 1580. Chrof. Marlen Pensioner." Cambridge Matriculation Book. "Xrof Marlyn, 1583, A.B." "Chr. Marley, 1587, A.M." Cambridge Grace Book. Thomas Nash, we know, passed* "seven yere together lacking a quarter" in residence at Cambridge; Robert Greene,† on the other hand, tells us that he had been drawn into travelling to Italy and Spain, and on his return to England had "ruffeled out in my silks in the habit of malcontent" before he became a Master of Arts. There was nothing, therefore, to have prevented Marlowe from travelling out of the island, and his home at Canterbury placed him in the very track‡ of the bold spirits who followed Leicester and Sidney to the Wars of the Low Countries. His familiarity with military terms, and his fondness for using them are most remarkable; and I make no doubt myself that he was trailing a pike or managing a charger with the English force a few months after " that strange engine for the brunt of war," "the fiery keel," had been hurled against "Antwerp bridge." In the days of Elizabeth, as in those of Anne, it may be granted that our army swore terribly in Flanders, and in the rough school of the march and the leaguer he was more likely to have acquired the habit of using profane oaths and appealing to the dagger than in the quiet halls on the banks of the Cam. While, therefore, it is very probable that some portion of the interval between 1583 and 1587 was thus employed, it is quite certain that a still greater part of it must have been passed in a diligent cultivation of the Muses; for the researches of Mr. Collier have placed it beyond a doubt, not only that Marlowe was the author of Tamburlaine the Great, but that both parts of that, in every sense of the word, astonishing drama, had been publicly performed in London at least as early as 1587.§ I have already mentioned Robert Greene and Thomas Nash as contemporaries at Cambridge. The former had taken his M.A. degree from Clare Hall in 1583, and the latter had just left St. John's College with nothing but the Bachelor's degree which he had obtained the year before. It seems probable that he had been compelled to quit the University, but, at any rate there were circumstances which rendered Marlowe's better fortune peculiarly irritating to him. Greene had originally belonged to the same College as Nash, and it may have been owing to this circumstance, or to a common jealousy of Marlowe's rising talents, that, when the former in this year 1587 published his Menaphon, Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues in his melancholy cell of Silexadra, &c. &c., he permitted or invited Nash to prefix an Epistle to the Reader. Of the work itself we learn from its interminable title-page that it was worthie the youngest eares for pleasure, or the gravest censures for principles," but it derives all its interest now from Nash's preface, which contains a violent tirade against the "idiot art-masters who intrude themselves to our ears as the alchymists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens by the swelling bombast of braggart blank verse," as also against those "who commit the digestion of their choleric incumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasylla Athena Cantabrigienses. The Repentance of Robert Greene. In a letter dated 12th Jan. 1586, Burghley describes to Leycester how his son Thomas Cecil, with 60 horses and 200 foot, had been lying at "Margat in Kent ever sence" the 26th December. § History of Dramatic Poetry, iii, 113. bon."* A great original genius had come soaring down from the topmost heights of Parnassus, and the kites and the crows, as is their wont on such rare occasions, had assembled together to pick holes in the nobler bird's plumage. And as it so happened the lights and shadows were so strong, and the colours so glaring, as to appear to invite the attacks of hostile beaks and claws. The reader of 1870 must endeavour to place himself in the position of the spectator of 1587 before he commences upon Tamburlaine the Great. He must consider that when it appeared the literature of England was only "mewing its mighty youth;" and that the fantastical and wearisome, yet eloquent and ingenious Euphues of John Lyly was to the then generation of Englishmen all, and more than all, that Pickwick and Vanity Fair and the Waverley Novels are to us just now. The Faery Queene† was still in manuscript, and so was The Arcadia ;‡ and although the public taste was showing itself ripe for the reception of dramatic entertainments of a high order, all that a clever body of rising young actors could obtain from a still cleverer body of rising young authors, was a tiresome farrago, in which stilted classicalities and puerile historic fables sought to mingle with the old moralities and the stupid jokes of clownish jackpuddings; the whole conveyed either in involved prose or in a bastard kind of verse, sometimes rhymed sometimes unrhymed, but, as a general rule, destitute of melody, strength, and animation, Tamburlaine the Great, with all its faults, which are not unfairly hit off by Greene and Nash, put an end to this at once and for ever, and cleared the way for the most vigorous shoot of that "noble literature, the greatest of the many glories of England." The pervading sins of Tamburlaine are so glaring and manifest that he who travels express may read them, but there can be no doubt that it was by virtue of these sins that the plays became so marvellously popular. The bombast and ranting which so grate upon our ears or provoke us to laughter, were in the days of Elizabeth absolutely essential to the conventional idea of an Oriental conqueror. It was this very "scenica! strutting, and furious vociferation," which, though "flying from all humanity," as Ben Jonson§ said fifty years afterwards, warranted the Tamer-lanes and Tamerchams of the late age to the ignorant gapers." But while thus of necessity ministering to the vulgar taste in one way by his representation of the Scythian Tamburlaine, "threatening the world with high astounding terms," this young poet of twenty-two 66 * The work in which this appears was published in 1587, and as there can be no mistake as to Tamburlaine being the production aimed at, it is plain that it must have been before the public some time previously. + The Faerie Queene, disposed into twelve books, fashioning XII Morall vertues. London, printed for William Ponsonbie, 1590. Mr. J. W. Hales, the latest biographer of Spenser, has repeated the old error of fixing the day of his death as the 16th of January. The following extract makes it clear that it occurred on the 13th :-"Spenser, our principall poet, comming lately out of Ireland, died at Westminster on Satterday last."-John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 17th Jan. 1598. The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia, written by Sir Philippe Sidnei. London. Printed for William Ponsonbie. Anno Domini 1590. § Ben Jonson's Discoveries. Ingeniorum Discrimina. Not. 10. Gifford's Ed. ix. 180. stood alone among the writers of 1586 in the rare power of grasping his subject as a whole that prime essential of excellence—and in the art of making his characters converse in a language which was at once harmonious, poetical, and natural. The opening lines of the Prologue,* if spoken when the play was first acted, proclaim, perhaps a little arrogantly, the poet's sense of the superiority of his work over that of any of his predecessors, but whatever his confidence may have been, he could hardly have anticipated the effect which was at once produced. Mr. Collier was the first modern writer to point out the great extent of our debt to Marlowe on this score, and his views on the subject have since been fully adopted by Mr. Hallam. "This play,” says that most cautious and judicious of critics,† "has more spirit and poetry than any which upon clear grounds can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification. If Marlowe did not re-establish blank verse, which is difficult to prove, he gave it at least a variety of cadence, and an easy adaptation of the rhythm to the sense, by which it instantly became in his hands the finest instrument that the tragic poet has ever employed for his purpose, less restricted than that of the Italians, and falling occasionally almost into numerous prose, lines of fourteen syllables being very common in all our old dramatists, but regular and harmonious at other times, as the most accurate ear could require." No man reaped greater advantage from this reform than Shakspeare, but so provoking occasionally is the bombast, that even he, all "gentle" as he was, could not resist making fun of a particular passage, which he has put into the mouth of Pistol in a manner so exquisitely ludicrous that up to the time of the publication of Mr. Collier's History of Dramatic Poetry all the intervening generations had received it as utterly damnatory of the poem from which it was taken. Even Charles Lamb‡ was so tickled with the humour of Mine Ancient that it blinded him to the beauty of some lines in the same passage where, addressing the pampered jades of Asia, he says: "The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven, Are not so honoured in their governor!" which one could almost fancy to have flowed from the pen of Shakspeare himself. The play, indeed, will be found full of such passages by any one who honestly searches for them. We are all taught to admire the spirit and fire of Hotspur when he says:— + Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. ii. p. 270. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Ed. 1849), i. 18. Mr. Dyce corrected this edition, as far as the quotations are concerned, but he omitted to notice that Lamb had given one of the lines quoted in the text,— "Making their fiery gait above the glades." And delightful as this exaggeration is, it is not at all more poetically conceived than many of the rants of the Scythian shepherd and his bassoes. Take for instance the following lines, which appear to me to breathe the very spirit of Harry Hotspur : "And till by vision or by speech I hear Immortal Jove say 'Cease my Tamburlaine,' Marlowe was no doubt as sensible as his critics of the injury done to his genius by the spirit of ranting which pervaded his first production, and selected a subject for his second which he felt himself able to handle in such a manner as would show the world that he had a spirit within him which would carry him to the loftiest heights of legitimate imagination. The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus has had the good fortune to be written of by Hazlitt in his happiest vein, and when Hazlitt is at his best, what critic can excel him in eloquence and discrimination. "His Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmo bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realize all the fictions of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstract reason; and for this purpose sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with 'fate and metaphysical aid.' Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once and for a moment, for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies becomes by this means present to his sense; whatever he commands is done. He calls back time past, and anticipates the future; the visions of antiquity pass before him-Babylon in all its glory, Paris, and none; all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute at his feet; all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure, and of learning, * P. 49 a. This idea, derived from the stars in their courses fighting against Sisera (Judges v. 20), had been previously employed in the first part of this play (p. 246), where the moon, the planets, and the meteors are represented as angels in their crystal armour fighting a doubtful battle with the resolves of Tamburlaine. I had followed Mr. Dyce in giving up in despair the lines introductory to these now referred to, but I have since fancied that a very trifling change-make in for making-would restore their meaning. "Eyes that, (when Ebena steps to heaven) In silence of thy solemn evening's walk, Make, in the mantle of the richest night The moon, the planets, and the meteors light." 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