catastrophe happened at Deptford, and that the name of Marlowe's antagonist was Ingram. Aubrey fixes the murder on a rival poet, Ben Jonson. A Monthly reviewer has thrown out the suspicion that Christopher Marlowe is but a borrowed designation of the great Shakspeare, "who disappears from all biographical research just at the moment when Marlowe first comes on the stage, and who reappears in his proper name in 1592, when a strange story was put in circulation that Marlowe had been recently assassinated with his own sword, which may," says the reviewer, "be allegorically true." In support of this theory, the reviewer goes on to point out the habitual resemblance of style between these two writers; and notices the fact, that the name of Marlowe as if being fictitious it were common property—was borrowed successively, after the pretended death of Marlowe, by several authors.' We think there is a refinement of scepticism in this theory of the identity of our two great dramatists. Judging from the internal evidence of their works alone, we are at a loss to conceive how any English critic should have come to the conclusion that Marlowe was only another name for the matchless Shakspeare. Not to count on any other points of difference, the want of unity and coherence so observable in all Marlowe's dramas, must for ever mark him out as one 'longo intervallo proximus' to Shakspeare.

A serious accusation has been preferred against Marlowe, which seems to have originated with Beard, namely, that he was an atheist, and "not only in word blasphemed the Trinity, but also, as it was credibly reported, wrote divers discourses against it, affirming our Saviour to be a deceiver, and Moses to be a conjurer,-the Holy Bible to contain only idle stories, and all religions but a device of policy." Bishop Tanner calls him atheista et blasphemus horrendus;' and Hawkens says of him, that "he was an excellent poet, but of abandoned morals, and of the most impious principles-a complete libertine, and an avowed atheist." All this rests, as we have observed, on the single authority of Beard, and he, after all, merely professes to make the statement upon hearsay! One is ready to ask where are the several blasphemous discourses which Marlowe penned? No one has seen them; and Greene, his intimate friend, when reproving him for his dissipated life, brings no such charge against him as Beard insinuates. No one can deny that Marlowe led a sensual and vicious life, but it is altogether unjust to accuse him of having penned a systematic attack upon the foundations of religion, without much better evidence than has yet been offered to substantiate so grave a charge.

Marlowe has written six plays; he also assisted Nash in his tragedy of Dido,' and Day in the comedy of The Maiden's Holiday,' which was never printed. The first and second, and part of the third sestiads of the poem of Hero and Leander' are known to have been written by him; he also translated the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia' into English blank verse, and the Elegies' of Ovid. The licentiousness of the Ovidean muse was rendered by him with such fidelity that his book was condemned and burnt at Stationer's hall, in 1599, by order of the archbishop of Canterbury.

We have already alluded to the principal defect in Marlowe's dra

Monthly Rev., vol. xxiii, pp. 61-63.

matic writings, their unskilful construction and the general want of coherence in their parts. Perhaps the most free from this defect of all his plays is that entitled 'Lust's Dominion.' But the best idea of Marlowe's powers, and also of his weaknesses, will be formed from his 'Faustus.' This play was always a favourite in those days, when witchcraft and magic were more implicitly believed in than now. It contains a good deal of low buffoonery and bombast, but has many passages of extraordinary power, and one scene in particular of tremendous interest, from which we must be allowed to quote rather fully:— (The clock strikes eleven.)

Faust. Oh, Faustus!

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heav'n,
That time may cease, and midnight never come.
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but a year
A month, a week, a natural day,

The Faustus may repent, and save his soul.
O lente lente currite noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
Oh, I'll leap up to heav'n!- Who pulls me down?

See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament:
One drop of blood will save me: oh, my Christ!
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Yet will I call on him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!-

Where is it now?-'tis gone?

And see, a threatening arm, an angry brow.
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of heav'n!
No! Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Gape, earth!—O no, it will not harbour me.
Yon stars, that reigned at my nativity,

Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud;
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths;
But let my soul mount and ascend to heav'n.

(The watch strikes.)

Oh! half the hour is past: 'twill all be past aner.
Oh! if my soul must suffer for my sin,
Impose some end to my incessant pain.
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved:
No end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast ?

Ah! Pythagoras' metemsy cosis! were that tru ́,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd
Into some brutish beast.

All beasts are happy, for when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heav'n.
(The clock strikes twelve.)
It strikes, it strikes! now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.

"1st Scho. Come, gentlemen, let us go visit Faustus,

For such a dreadful night was never seen

Since first the world's creation did begin;

Such fearful shrieks and cries were never heard ;

Pray heaven the doctor have escaped the danger!

2d Scho. Oh, help us, heavens! see, here are Faustus' limbs,

All torn asunder by the hand of death.

3d Scho. The devils who Faustus served have torn him thus; For, 'twixt the hours of twelve and one, methought

I heard him shriek, and cry aloud for help;

At which self-time the house seem'd all on fire,

With dreadful horror of these damned fiends."

Spenser.

BORN CIR. A. d. 1553.-DIED A. d. 1596.

THE century that immediately followed the death of Chaucer constitutes the most stormy period in the annals of England. The ill-established usurpation of the house of Lancaster, shaken by repeated insurrections, even during the life of its able founder, and illustrated rather than invigorated by the brilliant career of his heroic son, became at last, under the feeble sceptre of the sixth Henry, only a watch-word for awakening the fury of a divided population, and stirring the atrocities of a contest, which, whether we look to its protracted and exhausting fluctuations, or to the savage and unsparing character of its ever reciprocating barbarities, is without a parallel among all the great national tragedies that have at any other time spread bloodshed and desolation over our land. It was not till the tyranny of Richard was overthrown at Bosworth, and Henry VII. had united in his own favour the suffrages of all the parties in the state by his marriage with the only remaining daughter of the house of York, that men could be said to enjoy so much as a breathing time from the work of mutual slaughter, either in the field or on the scaffold. "This," says Hume, speaking of the battle of St Alban's, in 1455, "was the first blood spilt in that fatal quarrel, which was not finished in less than a course of fifty years, which was signalized by twelve pitched battles, which opened a scene of extraordinary fierceness and cruelty, is computed to have lost the lives of eighty princes of the blood, and almost entirely annihilated the ancient nobility of England." It is not to be wondered at that, amid the distraction of a time such as this, the voice of song was silent. The ears of men were too much occupied with other notes to be in tune for listening to those of the poet's lyre. With the exception, accordingly, of the obscure names of Occleve and Lydgate, and a mob of other mere versifiers still less deserving of attention, the history of English poetry is a blank from the death of Gower, the contemporary and friend of

6

Chaucer, in the beginning of the 15th century to the appearance of Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, more than a hundred and fifty years after. The publication of the poems of these two brother-bards was followed, after a short interval, by that of the singular work entitled, the Mirror of Magistrates,' only memorable, in a literary point of view, on account of two very remarkable poems which it contains, the productions of Thomas Sackville, then a very young man, and probably a student of law, but afterwards ennobled by the titles of Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset.

Edmund Spenser, one of the very greatest of our poets, is supposed to have been born about the year 1553, although even the researches of his latest biographer, Mr Todd, have not succeeded in absolutely determining the date. He was born in East Smithfield, London,'merry London,' as he calls it himself in one of his poems, the Prothalamion,

Of his parents not a notice or tradition has come down to usexcept that in his collection of sonnets entitled 'Amoretti,' he speaks of his mother's name as being Elizabeth. It appears, however, from various passages in his works, that he considered himself to be a connexion of the noble house of Spenser, or Spencer, and that the relationship was recognized by the principal branches of the family. Of his boyhood nothing is known. He appears by the college-records to have entered as a sizer of Pembroke-hall, Cambridge, on the 20th of May, 1569, and here he seems to have remained till he took his degree of A.M. on the 26th of June, 1576. His future productions amply testify how industriously he had employed the period of his academic residence in storing his mind with extensive, varied, and accurate learning. He is supposed to have finally left college in consequence of some disappointment which he met with, or of something which he and his friends construed into an act of injustice on the part of the authorities. Mr Todd is of opinion that he had before this time published some anonymous compositions in verse, and there seems to be no doubt, at any rate, that he had already acquired among his acquaintances a reputation for poetical abilities. One of the most intimate of his college friends was Gabriel Harvey, himself a poet, and also the author of several works in prose. It was Harvey who first drew Spenser to London. On quitting the university, the poet had, in the first instance, gone to reside with some of his relations in the north of England, in the capacity, as is conjectured, of domestic tutor; but, on Harvey's urgent representations, he was induced, in 1578, to come up to the metropolis, then, as it has ever since been, the grand theatre for the struggles of literary ambition. His time in the country had not been idly spent; and, besides a prose discourse entitled the 'English Poet,' which was never published, he brought many poetical compositions to town with him. Immediately on his arrival he was introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney, already one of the most distinguished patrons, as well as most promising ornaments of English literature. Sidney, besides recommending Spenser to the favour of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, took him with him to his seat at Pensaurst, in Kent, and detained him there for some time, availing himself,

it is supposed, of the learning of his new friend in pursuing his own studies.

The fruit of the leisure which Spenser thus enjoyed appeared the following year by the publication of his Shepherd's Calendar,' dedicated to Sidney. In this performance the poet records the history of his courtship of his mistress, Rosalind, and his rejection by her; a theme which he is understood to have taken not from fancy but from his actual experience. Some authorities go so far as to tell us that Rosalind is in fact the very name, almost undisguised, which the Icruel fair one bore. She was, they say, a Miss Rosa Lynde. The Shepherd's Calendar may be said at once to have raised Spenser to the first place among the poets of the age. A proof of its popularity is that five editions of it were finished in the course of the first twenty years after it made its appearance. The author, meanwhile, as appears from his correspondence with Harvey, part of which has been preserved, was now eagerly devoting himself to a new task-the composition, namely, of English verses, after the model and measure of the hexameters, pentameters, and iambics of classic song. Some of his efforts in this species of composition have come down to us, which, highly as they seem to have been admired by those of his friends who were plying their powers along with him in the same unnatural toil, are not very likely to have prepossessed less interested judges in favour either of the writer or of his prosodial system. It is gratifying to know, however, that Spenser was very soon cured of this folly. How lamentable a loss should we have sustained had the author of the Fairy Queen taken it into his head to compose that divine poem in bexameters, and, instead of the brightest fancies modulated into the sweetest verse in the world, had lavished all the wealth of his imagination on a vain attempt to make the English language speak with a Latin accent. It is certain that he had already begun the composition of the great work we have just mentioned, and it is probable that many of his hours were given to it, notwithstanding the dissuasions of his friend Harvey, who seems to have considered the time bestowed upon it as a very unprofitable subtraction from his other labours, the hexameters, and nine comedies, to which, it would appear, he intended, in imitation of Herodotus, to give the names of the nine muses. Our poet was erelong, however, destined to enter upon a new career. In 1580, Lord Grey of Wilton having been appointed lord-deputy of Ireland, Spenser was selected to accompany him to that country in the capacity of his secretary. For this honourable appointment he was probably indebted to the recommendation of the earl of Leicester. Lord Grey, however, was recalled in 1582, and Spenser, it is understood, returned with him to England. From this period we lose sight of him till, in 1586, we find him put in possession of 3028 acres of land in the county of Cork, being part of the forfeited estate of the earl of Desmond, by a grant dated the 27th of June that year, in which it is stated that the gift was bestowed upon him for his services to her majesty in Ireland. In the following October he lost his attached and powerful friend, Sidney, who was mortally wounded at the battle of Zutphen, in the thirtysecond year of his age, having already acquired a more brilliant reputation than any other individual of his time, both in letters and in arms. Spenser is supposed to have, immediately after this event,