To his mistress :

PAGAN TONE.

Each best day of our life at first doth go,
To them succeeds diseasèd age and woe;
Now die your pleasures, and the days you pray
Your rhymes and loves and jests will take away.
Therefore, my sweet, yet thou wilt go with me,
And not live here to what thou wouldst not see.

53

She not unnaturally shrinks from suicide. Her lover urges:

Yet know you not that any being dead

Repented them, and would have lived again?
They then their errors saw and foolish prayers;
But you are blinded in the love of life.
Death is but sweet to them that do approach it.
To me, as one that taken with Delphic rage,
When the divining God his breast doth fill,
He sees what others cannot standing by,
It seems a beauteous and pleasant thing.

Nero's meditations upon death, in the same tragedy, conjure up a companion picture of Tartarus :

O must I die, must now my senses close?
For ever die, and ne'er return again,

Never more see the sun, nor heaven, nor earth?
Whither go I? What shall I be anon?
What horrid journey wanderest thou, my soul,
Under the earth in dark, damp, dusky vaults?

Phlegethon and Styx toss their hoarse waves before him; the Furies shake their whips and twisted snakes :

And my own furies far more mad than they,

My mother and those troops of slaughtered friends.

XI.

The eternal nature of both happiness and misery, the presence of heaven or hell within the soul of man, irrespective of creeds and dogmas, were pictured with the force of men who felt the spiritual reality of life keenly. Marlowe makes Faustus ask the devil Mephistophilis where hell is :

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting life?

Dreadful was the path to death for those who died in sin. Webster's Flamineo cries to his murderous enemies :

Oh, the way 's dark and horrid ! I cannot see.
Shall I have no company?

They reply:

Yes, thy sins

Do run before thee, to fetch fire from hell

To light thee thither.

With the same ghastly energy his sister utters a like thought of terror:

My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,

Is driven, I know not whither.

Yet the dauntless courage and strong nerves of these 'glorious villains' sustained them to the last :

We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Yea, cease to die, by dying.

MEDITATIONS ON LIFE.

55

So they speak, when the game of life has been played out; and then, like travellers,

Go to discover countries yet unknown.

Ask of such men, what is life?

It is a tale told by an idiot,

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Ask, what are men?

We are merely the stars' tennis balls,
Struck and banded which way please them.
To be man

Is but to be the exercise of cares

In several shapes; as miseries do grow

They alter as men's forms; but none know how.

'The world's a tedious theatre,' says one. Another

cries:

Can man by no means creep out of himself,

And leave the slough of viperous grief behind?

It is a pleasure to collect these utterances on life and death, so pointed and so passionate, so pregnant with deep thought and poignant with heartfelt emotion. It must, however, be remembered, that they are dramatic sayings, put into the lips of scenic personages. To take them as the outcry from their authors' own experience would be uncritical, Yet the frequency of their Occurrence indicates one well-marked quality of our drama. That is the sombre cast of Melancholy, deep Teutonic meditative Melancholy, which drapes it with a tragic pall. When Marston invites his audience to a performance of Antonio's Revenge,' he not only relies upon this mood in the spectators, but he paints it with the exultation of one to whom it is familiar and dear.

ed hising his dead lady's skull :

many shapes. Fan

MELANCHOLY.

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself? . . .
Thou mayst lie chaste now! it were fine, methinks,
To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts,
And unclean brothels.

Tender in Palador's bewilderment:

Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him!
For he is like to something I remember
A great while since, a long long time ago.

Exquisite in the Dirge for Chrysostom :

Sleep, poor youth, sleep in peace,

Relieved from love and mortal care;
Whilst we, that pine in life's disease,
Uncertain-blessed, less happy are.

57

Close to this melancholy, is religion. Though rarely touched on by our playwrights, the cardinal points of Christian doctrine were present to their minds; and when they struck that chord of piety, it was with a direct and manly hand:

The best of men

That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.

This is no conventional portrait of the Founder of our faith. Nor are these solemn words, in which an injured husband absolves his penitent and dying wife, spoken from the lips merely :

As freely from the low depths of my soul
As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,
I pardon thee.

Even as I hope for pardon at that day

When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,
So be thou pardoned.