Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist-a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one may be given:—

A gentle squire would gladly entertain

Into his house some trencher-chaplain ;1

Some willing man that might instruct his sons
And that would stand to good conditions.

First, that he lie upon the truckle bed,
Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head.
Second, that he do, on no default,2

Ever presume to sit above the salt.

Third, that he never change his trencher twice.
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies;
Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait.
Last, that he never his young master beat,

But he must ask his mother to define,

How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observ'd he could contented be

To give five marks and winter livery."

John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved himself in the inextricable and not much worth extricating quarrels which have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's plays. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in 1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of his—

1 "Chaplain "-trisyllable like "capellan."

Pigmalion's Image and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same year by a sequel, entitled The Scourge of Villainy. In these works he called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both the earlier Satires and The Scourge denounce lewd verse most fullmouthedly, Pigmalion's Image is a poem in the Venus and Adonis style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious descriptions. It was, in fact, with the Satires and much similar work, formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate "society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make the identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writers who delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history of the world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusations against their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partly draws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however, has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent; and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not come quite near his confused and only halfintelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought.

"Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth'd Lamians,
Shape-changing Proteans, damn'd Briarians,
Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep,
That ye thus dare unto Jove's palace creep?
What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip,
That ye dare strive on Hebe's cup to sip?

Ye know Apollo's quiver is not spent,
But can abate your daring hardiment.
Python is slain, yet his accursed race
Dare look divine Astrea in the face;
Chaos return and with confusion
Involve the world with strange disunion;
For Pluto sits in that adored chair
Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir.
O hecatombs! O catastrophe!

From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary!
Prometheus, who celestial fire

Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire
Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind,
Whereby we might the depth of nature find,
Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart
Which did such deep philosophy impart
To mortal men."

The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches of Marston's own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of the style, is very curious.

Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book Skialetheia, published between the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist from either, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is the same exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity of phrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But the fine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous Transformed Metamorphosis, attributed to the powerful but extravagant dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing:

"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto,

Whereon in female shape a serpent stands.

Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow,
With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants,
And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts
The pleasure that doth seem there to be found,
She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.

"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall

Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue;

The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale

There minulize their pleasing lays anew.

This welcome to the bitter bed of rue;

This little room will scarce two wights contain
T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.

"But next thereto adjoins a spacious room,

More fairly fair adorned than the other :
(O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom,

That to these shadows hath his mind given over)
For (0) he never shall his soul recover:

If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack
And his repentant hand him hales not back."1

We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy and the serene loveliness of The Faërie Queene.

1 Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanised refers to one of the Fauna of fancy,-a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from μvvpišw, "I sing." "To awhape"="to confound."

CHAPTER V

THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD-SHAKESPERE

THE difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great writers are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been already said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which is not in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrably foolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers, ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to an extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject. It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at great length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may be presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of his predecessors. These inconveniences, however, must here be risked, and it may perhaps be thought that the necessity of risking them is a salutary one. In no other case is it so desirable that an author should be approached by students with the minimum of apparatus.

The scanty facts and the abundant fancies as to Shakespere's life are a commonplace of literature. He was baptized on the 24th of April 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, and must have been