Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain

*The puritans of the seventeenth, like their descendants of the nineteenth century, were not much influenced by the catholic spirit of the poet. Their hero, Thomas Brand, a noted zealot, relates the catastrophe of unhappy Marlowe :

"Not inferior to any of the former in atheism and impiety, and equal to all in manner of punishment, was one of our own nation of fresh and late memory, called Marlowe, by profession a scholar, brought up from his youth in the University of Cambridge, but by practice a play-maker, and a poet of scurrility, who, by giving too large a swing to his own wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reins, fell (not without just desert) to that great outrage and extremity, that he denied God and his son (Christ, and not only in word blasphemed the Trinity, but also (as it is credibly reported) wrote books against it, affirming our Saviour to be a deceiver, and Moses but to be a seducer of the people, and the Holy Bible to be but vain and idle stories, and all religion but a device of policy. But see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dog: so it fell out, that as he purposed to stab one whom he ought a grudge unto with his dagger; the other party perceiving, so avoided the stroke, that withal catching the wrist, he stabbed his own dagger into his own head, in such sort, that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be brought, he shortly after died thereof; the manner of his death being so terrible, (for he even cursed and blasphemed to his last gasp, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth,) that it was not only a manifest sign of God's judgment, but also an horrible and fearful terror to behold him. But herein did the justice of God most notably appear, in that he compelled his own hand, which had written those blasphemies, to be the instrument to punish him, and that in his brain which had devised the same."-Theatre of God's Judgments, p. 92.

+ The last editor of Marlowe (Mr. Dyce) would fain have some other writer the author of Tamburlaine. Mr. Collier, however, (History of DraPoetry vol. iii. p. 112.) has left no room for doubt.

merit. To the vulgar, bombast is more acceptable than sobriety, fustian than reason or experience. Never was bombast, never was fustian, more common than in this drama. Take a few examples, which may serve to illustrate at once the age and the man.

After his conquest of the soldan of Egypt, Tamburlaine endeavours to console the vanquished monarch by representing himself as irresistible both to gods and

men:

"'T was I, my lord, that got the victory

The God of War resigns his room to me,
Meaning to make me general of the world.
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan,
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.
Where'er I come, the fatal sisters sweat;

And grisly death, by running to and fro

To do their ceaseless homage to my sword."

The mention of Mars, of Jove, and of the fatal sisters, must seem odd in the mouth of a zealous mussulman like Tamerlaine; but Ben Jonson was the first that brought learning in aid of the buskined muse.

Tamerlaine is much attached to his queen Xenocrate, whom, however, not all his power, favourite of hea

the bed from which, alive, she must never more descend; and he, seated by her side, thus expresses the sympathy of earth and heaven with the event:

"Black is the beauty of the brightest day :
The golden ball of Heaven's eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams;
And all with faintness, and for foul disgrace,
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate, that give him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers,
And temper'd every soul with lively heat,
Now, by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath.