Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacynths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them, indifferently rated,

May serve in peril of calamity

To ransom great kings from captivity.
This is the ware wherein consists my wealth:

Infinite riches in a little room."

This is the very poetry of avarice. Let us now look a little more closely at Marlowe as a dramatist. Here also he has an importance less for what he accomplished than for what he suggested to others. Not only do I think that Shakespeare's verse caught some hints from his, but there are certain descriptive passages and similes of the greater poet which, whenever I read them, instantly bring Marlowe to my mind. This is an impression I might find it hard to convey to another, or even to make definite to myself; but it is an old one, and constantly repeats itself, so that I put some confidence in it. Marlowe's Edward II. certainly served Shakespeare as a model for his earlier historical plays. Of course he surpassed his model, but Marlowe might have said of him as Oderisi, with pathetic modesty, said to Dante of his rival and surpasser, Franco of Bologna, "The praise is now all his, yet mine in part." But it is always thus. The path-finder is forgotten when the track is once blazed out. It was in Shakespeare's Richard II. that Lamb detected the influence of Marlowe, saying that "the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare has scarce improved upon in Richard." In the parallel scenes of both plays the sentiment is rather elegiac than dramatic, but there is a deeper pathos, I think, in Richard, and his grief rises at times to a passion which is wholly wanting in Edward. Let me

read Marlowe's abdication scene. The irresolute nature of the king is finely indicated. The Bishop of Winchester has come to demand the crown; Edward takes it off, and says:

"Here, take my crown; the life of Edward too:
Two kings of England cannot reign at once.
But stay awhile: let me be king till night,
That I may gaze upon this glittering crown;
So shall my eyes receive their last content,
My head the latest honor due to it,
And jointly both yield up their wished right.
Continue ever, thou celestial sun;

Let never silent night possess this clime;
Stand still, you watches of the element;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay-
That Edward may be still fair England's king!
But day's bright beam doth vanish fast away,
And needs I must resign my wishèd crown.
Inhuman creatures, nursed with tiger's milk,
Why gape you for your sovereign's overthrow?-
My diadem, I mean, and guiltless life.
See, monsters, see, I'll wear my crown again.
What, fear you not the fury of your king?

I'll not resign, but whilst I live be king!"
Then, after a short further parley:
"Here, receive my crown.
Receive it? No; these innocent hands of mine
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime:
He of you all that most desires my blood,
And will be called the murderer of a king,
Take it. What, are you moved? Pity you me?
Then send for unrelenting Mortimer,
And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel,
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.
Yet stay, for rather than I'll look on them,
Here, here!-Now, sweet God of Heaven,
Make me despise this transitory pomp,
And sit for aye enthronizèd in Heaven!
Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or, if I live, let me forget myself."

Surely one might fancy that to be from the prentice hand of Shakespeare. It is no small distinction that this can be said of Marlowe, for it can be said of no other. What follows is still finer. The ruffian who is to murder Edward, in order to evade his distrust, pretends to weep. The king exclaims:

"Weep'st thou already? List awhile to me,
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is,
Or as Matrevis', hewn from the Caucasus,
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale.
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls,
And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days' space; and, lest that I should sleep,
One plays continually upon a drum;
They give me bread and water, being a king;
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance,
My mind's distempered and my body numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no I know not.
O, would my blood dropt out from every vein,
As doth this water from my tattered robes!
Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus,
When, for her sake, I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Clerëmont."

This is even more in Shakespeare's early manner than the other, and it is not ungrateful to our feeling of his immeasurable supremacy to think that even he had been helped in his schooling. There is a truly royal pathos in "They give me bread and water"; and "Tell Isabel the queen," instead of "Isabel my queen," is the most vividly dramatic touch that I

remember anywhere in Marlowe. And that vision of the brilliant tournament, not more natural than it is artistic, how does it not deepen by contrast the gloom of all that went before! But you will observe that the verse is rather epic than dramatic. I mean by this that its every pause and every movement are regularly cadenced. There is a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the passage not so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction less naturally simple, it would seem stiff. Nothing is more peculiarly characteristic of the mature Shakespeare than the way in which his verses curve and wind themselves with the fluctuating emotion or passion of the speaker and echo his mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen when Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband bidding her meet him at Milford-Haven. The words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the collie chases them.

"O, for a horse with wings!-Hear'st thou, Pisanio?
He is at Milford-Haven: Read, and tell me
How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs
May plod it in a week, why may not I
Glide thither in a day?-Then, true Pisanio
(Who long'st like me to see thy lord; who long'st
O, let me 'bate-but not like me-yet long'st-
But in a fainter kind:-0, not like me;
For mine's beyond beyond)-say, and speak thick
(Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing,
To the smothering of the sense), how far it is
To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
To inherit such a haven: but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence."

The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is in keeping not only with the feeling of the moment, but with what we already know of the impulsive character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he could not, teach Shakespeare this secret, nor has anybody else ever learned it.

There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe-but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know them, but only to know what they do and say. The nearest approach to a character is Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, and he is but the incarnation of the popular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man. Here is his own account of himself:

"As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls; Sometimes I go about and poison wells;

And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See 'em go pinioned by my door along;
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells;
And, after that, was I an engineer,

And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,

I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.

But mark how I am blest for plaguing them-
I have as much coin as will buy the town."

Here is nothing left for sympathy. This is the mere lunacy of distempered imagination. It is shocking, and not terrible. Shakespeare makes no such mistake with Shylock. His passions are those of a man, though of a man depraved by oppression and contumely; and he shows sentiment, as when he says of the ring that Jessica had given for a monkey: "It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor." And yet, observe the profound humor with which Shakespeare makes him think first of its dearness as a precious stone and then as a keepsake. In letting him exact his pound of flesh, he but follows the story as he found it in Giraldi Cinthio, and is careful to let us know that this Jew had good reason, or thought he had, to hate Christians. At the end, I think he meant us to pity Shylock, and we do pity him. And with what a smiling background of love and poetry does he give relief to the sombre figure of the Jew! In Marlowe's play there is no respite. And yet it comes nearer to having a connected plot, in which one event draws on another, than any other of his plays. I do not think Milman right in saying that the interest falls off after the first two acts. I find enough to carry me on to the end, where the defiant death of Barabas in a caldron of boiling oil he had arranged for another victim does something to make a man of him. But there is no controlling reason in the piece. Nothing happens because it must, but because the author wills it so. The conception of

life is purely arbitrary, and as far from nature as that of an imaginative child. It is curious, however, that here, too, Marlowe should have pointed the way to Shakespeare. There is no resemblance, however, between the Jew of Malta and the Jew of Venice, except that both have daughters whom they love. Nor is the analogy close even here. The love which Barabas professes for his child fails to humanize him to us, because it does not prevent him from making her the abhorrent instrument of his wanton malice in the death of her lover, and because we cannot believe him capable of loving anything but gold and vengeance. There is always something extravagant in the imagination of Marlowe, but here it is the extravagance of absurdity. Generally he gives us an impression of power, of vastness, though it be the vastness of chaos, where elemental forces hurtle blindly one against the other. But they are elemental forces, and not mere stage properties. Even in Tamburlaine, if we see in himas Marlowe, I think, meant that we should see the embodiment of brute force, without reason and without conscience, he ceases to be a blusterer, and becomes, indeed, as he asserts himself, the Scourge of God.

There is an exultation

of strength in this play that seems to add a cubit to our stature. Marlowe had found the way that leads to style, and helped others to find it, but he never arrived there. He had not self-denial enough. He can refuse nothing to his fancy. He fails of his effect by over-emphasis, heaping upon a slender thought a burthen of expression too heavy for it to carry. But it is not with fagots, but with priceless Oriental stuffs, that he breaks their backs.

Marlowe's Dr. Faustus interests us in another way. Here he again shows himself as a precursor. There is no attempt at profound philosophy in this play, and in the conduct of it Marlowe has followed the prose history of Dr. Faustus closely, even in its scenes of mere buffoonery. Disengaged from these, the figure of the protagonist is not without grandeur. is not avarice or lust that tempts him at first, but power. Weary of his studies in law, medicine, and divinity, which have failed to bring him what he seeks, he turns to necromancy.

"These metaphysics of magicians (he says) And necromantic books are heavenly.

It

Oh, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artizan !
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces;
Nor can they raise the winds or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a mighty god.

Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity." His good angel intervenes, but the evil spirit at the other ear tempts him with power again:

"Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, Lord and commander of these elements." Erelong Faustus begins to think of power for baser uses:

"How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,

Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for Orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.'

And yet it is always to the pleasures of
the intellect that he returns. It is when
the good and evil spirits come to him for
the second time that wealth is offered as
a bait, and after Faustus has signed away
his soul to Lucifer, he is tempted even by
more sensual baits. I may be reading
into the book what is not there, but I
cannot help thinking that Marlowe in-
tended in this to typify the inevitably
continuous degradation of a soul that has
renounced its ideal, and the drawing on
of one vice by another, for they go hand
in hand like the Hours. But even in his
degradation the pleasures of Faustus are
mainly of the mind, or at worst of a sen-
suous and not sensual kind. No doubt
in this Marlowe is unwittingly betraying
his own tastes. Faustus is made to say:
"And long ere this I should have slain myself
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and Enon's death?
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp
Made music with my Mephistophilis ?
Why should I die, then? basely why despair ?"

This employment of the devil in a duet seems odd. I remember no other instance of his appearing as a musician except in Burns's "Tam o' Shanter." The last wish of Faustus was Helen of Troy.

.

Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena:

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

No such verses had ever been heard on the English stage before, and this was one of the great debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. The last scene of the play, in which the bond with Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of Faust's eddying thought, and seems to writhe and gasp in that agony of hopeless despair.

"Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
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,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the
firmament!

One drop would save my soul-half a drop; ah, my Christ!

Ah, 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 where God

Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No? No?

Then will I headlong run into the earth.

Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbour me!

.

Ah! half the hour is past; 'twill all be past anon. O God,

If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet, for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom

ed me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years-
A hundred thousand-and at last be saved!
Oh, no end's limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why was this immortal that thou hast ?
Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell!

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven.
Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell.
O soul, be changed to little waterdrops
And fall into the ocean; ne'er be found!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis !"

It remains to say a few words of Marlowe's poem of "Hero and Leander," for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope's cadence:

"Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,

By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn."

It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his "Endymion." A single passage will serve to prove this: "So fair a church as this had Venus none; The walls were of discolored jasper stone, Wherein was Proteus carved, and overhead A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes outwrung."

Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of those long sequences of musical proper names of which he made such effective use. Here are two passages which Milton surely had read and pondered:

"So from the East unto the furthest West
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm;
The galleys and those pilling brigantines
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf,
And hover in the straits for Christians' wreck,
Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,
Until the Persian fleet and men of war
Sailing along the Oriental sea

Have fetched about the Indian continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar."

This is still more Miltonic:

"As when the seaman sees the Hyades Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds, Auster and Aquilon with winged steeds,

All fearful folds his sails and sounds the main."

Spenser, too, loved this luxury of sound, as he shows in such passages as this: "Now was Aldebaran uplifted high

Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair."

And I fancy he would have put him there to make music, even had it been astronomically impossible, but he never strung such names in long necklaces as Marlowe and Milton were fond of doing.

Was Marlowe, then, a great poet? For such a title he had hardly range enough of power, hardly reach enough of thought. But surely he had some of the finest qualities that go to the making of a great poet; and his poetic instinct, when he had time to give himself wholly over to its guidance, was unerring. I say when he had time enough, for he, too, like his fel

lows, was forced to make the daily task bring in the daily bread. We have seen how fruitful his influence has been, and perhaps his genius could have no surer warrant than that the charm of it lingered in the memory of poets, for theirs is the memory of mankind. If we allow him genius, what need to ask for more? And perhaps it would be only to him among the group of dramatists who surrounded Shakespeare that we should allow it. He was the herald that dropped dead in announcing the victory in whose fruits he was not to share.

NE

I.

[EAR the top of the ridge that runs more or less parallel to the main street of Horta, the principal town of Fayal, stands a small, double-storied house of a bright poppy-red color, that contrasts not unpleasingly with the green vines by which it is partially covered. A little below, in the garden, surrounded more Fayalense by high lava walls lined with a hedge of camellias, are the pineapple houses, the orange grove, the dovecot, and the wine estufa. Behind, in the compound, and a little higher upon the terraced swell of the hill, stands the old office, washed white with lime, and also buried in verdure; the windmill for grinding the household wheat; and the monumental cistern, with its complex net of conduits and multiple little water-wheels, set one below the other along the main trough that runs through the gardens.

It was to this pretty home that Captain John Tottencourt retired after his last whaling voyage-a most unlucky one; for early in the second year of his cruise he had lost his right foot, caught in the bight of a line that was whistling over the thwarts in the wake of a right-whale he had just harpooned; and a couple of months later, on his return from the Cape Verdes, his ship was picked up by a northeaster in Horta Bay, dashed against the sea-wall, and ground to pulp on the rocks that surround this so-called harbor with a row of teeth as sharp and hungry as those of a shark.

Here, on the summit of the hill, whence he could sweep both entrances of the channel with his glass, the old sailor lived alone with his comely daughter, Orient, who was the only one to coax him into good humor when the gout pinched the toes that he still owned, or racked the foot that was somewhere off the coast of Africa, and yet hurt him as though it were within reach of his hand. With plenty of Trinidad tobacco, "a butt of sherry to keep him merry," and "enough gin to warm his grin," honest old John thought himself pretty well "fixed" and happy.

On stormy nights, when the wind whistled through the halyards of his flag-staff, he loved to pull on his sou'wester and well-greased left boot, and stump up and down the little quarter-deck he had built over the roof, calling to imaginary mates through his trumpet, and trying to fancy that he was once more handling his lost ship over the familiar whaling-grounds. On such occasions, always provided his arch-enemy, the gout, would allow it, he became as nimble on his jury-leg as had that been a part of his original rigging. After standing his watch, and thus having his little pleasure," as Orient would say in her uncertain Portuguese English, he would come down to his cabin, brew a glass of stiff grog, and turn in, all standing, on an old hair-cloth sofa, leaving distinct orders to be called at eight bells, or any time before that if the weather shifted. The time in his house was always