is surpassed by none to be found in English drama. Very few in all our literature can stand beside it. It rouses the same emotion, it touches our imagination in the same way as do the murder scene in “Macbeth,” the last act of " Othello," or the stormscene in "Lear." More such grief-impelling passages from Ford, Webster, and yet again from Shakespeare, might possibly be cited to compare, for their tragic intensity, with this, the finest and the first. Here, as in all great works of art, by simple means the great effect is obtained. Unlike Marlowe's other dramas, wherein the horrors are so profusely piled up that they defeat their end, and fail to produce emotion, "Edward II." moves and thrills us by its simplicity and humanity. The last act is in the manner of Euripides-the laying bare of a king's suffering and death itself creates the emotion. This stern presentment of human misery and anguish, relying upon that to touch the spectator, is truly Greek. Shakespeare, with all those after him, must have profited largely by this grand lesson in the art of moving an audience by the simplest and most potent means.

"Edward II.” was Marlowe's ripest play, his most splendid legacy to all who came after him along the road that he first boldly pointed out. We must turn to that in order to know the real Marlowe, in order to get at the full estimate of his genius, and to feel how great was the loss to our literature when death took him. And we may safely place it, not only with our greatest dramas, but with those eternal ones that are for all time.

From Virgil's "Eneid" Marlowe took a subject that he never lived to work out. "Dido, Queen of Carthage," at his death, was probably but a set of speeches and formless scenes that Nash afterwards developed and arranged for the stage. Critics believe this to be the play that bears fewest marks of the poet's lofty style. No attempt at lustpainting is here; the tale of Dido's unhappy love is treated dramatically, though with little art; it is again the poetry in this which gives it beauty. A curious opening scene, laid in Olympus, has almost a note of burlesque in it, and we must remark the strong translation from Virgil of the tale of Troy's fall. Nash, if he helped to make

this, surely never wrote those two lines about the Grecians

"In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire

That after burnt the pride of Asia."

They have the real Marlowe accent. Again, when Venus offers to lay Ascanius

"Amongst green brakes,

And strew him with sweet-smelling violets,
With blushing roses, purple hyacinths;"

when Dido, thirsty for Æneas' love, cries

"I'll make me bracelets of his golden hair;
His glistering eyes shall be my looking-glass;
His lips an altar, where I'll offer up
As many kisses as the sea hath sands;
Instead of music I will hear him speak;
His looks shall be my only library;"

or when, in those few rich lines, the nurse describes her orchard, we seem to hear the true Marlowe charming us, and we feel less willing to believe that Nash did more than just priserve these scattered jewels in his rude setting.

It is worthy of remark that "Dido" is Marlowe's only play which depends for its interest upon love. In all his other dramas he has never cared to give love any prominence. Nor did he try to create any interesting female figure. He has no heroines. Xenocrate, Zabina, Bellamira, Isabel, are all shadowy, intangible beings, without individuality, without charm. If "Dido" interests us, it is because Virgil has drawn her; Marlowe merely, reproduces the picture, with no perceptible sympathy for his subject. He seems to take most delight when he may indulge his passion for rich and coloured description; when he may paint ships with golden cordage, crystal anchors, and ivory oars; when he may speak of Dido's "silver arms" and "tears of pearl," or imagine common soldiers" in "rich

embroidered coats," with

"Silver whistles to control the winds."

And this exuberant passion for describing and contemplating the beautiful, this delight in all outward and visible loveliness, strong as it is in all his dramas, seems strongest in that magnificent

fragment of narrative verse, "Hero and Leander.” For its splendour of imagery, lustre of epithet, and melody of phrase, this takes the first place among all similar work of the golden Elizabethan age. Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" comes far below it; indeed, that poem is both an imitation and a failure. Marlowe handled the long rhyming couplet as no one else could handle it, giving to it the three supreme qualities of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. As we read his "goulden lynes," his sweet-according rimes," I think they touch our imagination, they satisfy our sense of form and melody in a far deeper degree than any dexterous, polished passage that we can choose from Pope, professedly a master in the making of that difficult kind of verse.

To produce a match for "Hero and Leander," to find an English poem really similar to it in feeling and in form, we must pass down the centuries until we come to that other "Elizabethan, born out of due time," until we come to Keats and to his "Endymion." That breathes the same frank, sensuous love for the beautiful-that has the same