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very different being. He is said to be wasteful and given to favouritism but in all his appearances upon the stage, he comports himself with royal dignity. The faults that work his overthrow are impetuous indiscretion, and a greater love for Fine Art than the duties of government. His reverses turn upon a much finer pivot than Edward's gross abuse of power: he might have kept his throne had he not on a random impulse stopped the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray and sent them both into banishment :

"O when the king did throw his warder down,
His own life hung upon the staff he threw."

Richard's death is heroic; and his reflections in the dungeon may be contrasted with Gaveston's schemes for the amusement of Edward, as showing the higher reach of his philosophic and artistic culture. A close comparison of Mortimer and Hotspur reveals still more striking dissimilarities. Mortimer is outspoken and delights in war like Hotspur, but he shows no trace of the amiable qualities of Harry Percy. He is actuated by a coarse ambition to marry the queen and seize the throne, and is the author of the gross cruelty wreaked upon the helpless king. Harry Percy is presented in more varied as well as more amiable lights. He chafes and "chaffs" Glendower with impudence privileged by its happy audacity. He is wrapt up in warlike schemes: he gives playful evasive answers to his wife's questions; sometimes he is so preoccupied that he does not answer till an hour afterwards. He is fondly beloved by his Kate while he is alive, he is her "mad ape," her "paraquito," a dear provoking fellow; and when he dies, her noble eulogy of his chivalrous nature shows how deep was his hold of her affections. To his rival Hal, his overpowering devotion to war sometimes appears a little comical; but his courage and prowess receive all deference and honour. Of all those traits that give Harry Percy individual life, there is not the faintest prefiguration in Marlowe's young Mortimer. Character-painting, indeed, was not in Marlowe's way his personages do not show many-sided character in

their different relations. All his creations relax under the charms of love, and express themselves with glowing affection; but they all relax and warm into raptures very much after the same fashion. There is no such discrimination in Marlowe as the distinction between the wooing of Troilus and the wooing of Diomede, not to speak of finer distinctions. Even Edward's love for Gaveston and the Jew's love for his daughter flow into the same current of language as Tamburlaine's love for Zenocrate, and Faustus's admiration of Helen.

The fragment of "Hero and Leander" is incomparably the finest product of Marlowe's genius: it is one of the chief treasures of the language. The poet is fairly intoxicated with the beauty of his subject: he has thought about the two lovers, and dreamed about them, and filled his imagination with their charms; he writes with ecstasy as if obeying an impulse that he can resist no longer, and in every other line expressions escape him that have all the warmth of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes into the subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation with a few impatient strokes, and at once proceeding to descant on the beauty of Hero :

"On Hellespont, guilty of true lovers' blood,
In view and opposite two cities stood,
Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might;
The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight.
At Sestos Hero dwelt; Hero the fair,
Whom young Apollo courted for her hair,
And offered as a dower his burning throne
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon.

Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined,
And looking in her face was strooken blind.
But this is true; so like was one the other,
As he imagined Hero was his mother;
And oftentimes into her bosom flew,
About her naked neck his bare arms threw,
And laid his childish head upon her breast,
And with still panting rock, there took his rest.

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun,

As Nature wept thinking she was undone,
Because she took more from her than she left,
And of such wondrous beauty her bereft :
Therefore in sign her treasure suffered wrack,
Since Hero's time hath half the world been black."

From Hero he passes to Leander

"Amorous Leander, beautiful and young,
Whose tragedy divine Musæus sung,

Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none
For whom succeeding times make greater moan."

Leander's beauty is painted in even more glowing colours than Hero's. In his picture of the infatuated doating of Edward II. on Piers Gaveston, Marlowe had already shown that he understood the passion that may be felt for the beauty of young men, and here we have a stronger evidence. He describes Leander with something like a Greek feeling for his beauties, his arms, his smooth breast, his white shoulder, his orient cheeks and lips: some of the particulars would seem to have been adopted by Shakespeare and applied to the praise of his beautiful friend. The poem as a whole is more voluptuous and earnestly impassioned in sentiment than Shakespeare's corresponding poem of "Venus and Adonis :" the poet did not live to carry the tale into its tragic stage.

III. ROBERT GREENE (1560-1592).

To class Greene among the dramatists is rather a harsh measure for his reputation, although the arrangement is justified by his relations with the stage. When Shakespeare began to write, Marlowe and Greene were the most firmly established playwrights, and both himself and his friends testify to the eagerness of rival managers to obtain the hastiest of Greene's performances. Yet Greene's plays are by no means the best fruits of his pen. He began his literary career as an author of love-tales or novels in prose

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interspersed with songs and lyrics and as he had a most rich and vivid feeling for colour, and a fine ear for the music of verse, these occasional pieces are by far his best productions. If, therefore, we were to estimate him by quality rather than by quantity, we should place him rather among the love-poets than among the dramatists. As a dramatist he was a follower of Lyly and Marlowe as a writer of pastoral lyrics he was Marlowe's predecessor and superior.

The earliest production of Greene's hitherto discovered is "Mamillia," an imitation to a certain extent of Lyly's "Euphues," published in 1583, while the author was in residence at Clare Hall, Cambridge, just before taking the degree of M.A. He had come up from Norwich to St John's, and had graduated B.A. in 1578: after that, though his father would not seem to have been a rich man, he found means to travel in Spain, Italy, and other parts of the Continent. According to his own account, written in deathbed repentance, he had learnt in Italy luxurious, profligate, and abominable habits, and on his return soon exhausted both his money and his credit, and was at his wits' end for a suitable profession. After vacillating for a little between the Church and Physic, he finally gravitated to the last resort of such unsteady spirits-"became an author of plays and a penner of love-pamphlets." "Mamillia" was rapidly followed by a host of other love-pamphlets: "Morando," "Menaphon," "Perimedes the Blacksmith," " Pandosto, the Triumph of Time" (reprinted by Mr Collier as the foundation of the "Winter's Tale"), "Philomela, the Lady Fitzwater's Nightingale" (reprinted along with "Menaphon" in Brydges' "Archaica"), and many others. These euphuistically-embellished tales were the fashionable reading of ladies on their first appearance, and afterwards went through many editions, to the delight of sentimental maids in humbler life. Greene's fertility is all the more amazing when we consider the debauched life that he led : we need not wonder at his early death when we see how he burnt the candle at both endshard work and immoderate dissipation. Five of his plays have come down to us; "Orlando Furioso" (published

1594); "Looking-Glass for London and England" (1594, written in conjunction with Lodge); "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay" (1594); "James the Fourth" (1598); "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" (1599). "George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield" (1599), is also attributed to him.

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Greene saw a great deal of villanous company during his brief career in London. His own excuse for his choice of depraved associates was that he wished to paint their manIt is not impossible that this was part of his motive for consorting with rogues and sharpers: it may even have been the apology that he offered to his own conscience. Yet with all allowances for his thus stooping to gain professional ends, we shall probably not be far wrong if we accept Mr Dyce's conclusion, that of all "the Muse's sons whose vices have conducted them to shame and sorrow, none, perhaps, have sunk to deeper degradation and misery." We must not be prejudiced against Greene because he assailed the youthful Shakespeare so bitterly, nor must we take Gabriel Harvey's picture as accurate in every particular. But it seems indisputable that Greene reduced himself to extreme distress by extravagant profligacy; that he spent recklessly, and was not over-scrupulous in replenishing his coffers; and that in his struggle for the means of debauchery he was bitterly jealous and envious of all literary competitors. Marlowe as well as Shakespeare had been an object of attack when he began his career of playwright: he was seemingly attacked in Nash's preface to Greene's "Menaphon," and afterwards his "Tamburlaine" and its blank verse were directly sneered at by Greene himself. Indeed, Greene confessed in his repentant fit that he could not keep a friend he behaved to his friends in such a way as to turn them into utter enemies.

It seems possible to trace the reaction from this intemperate life of debauchery, hard work, and bitterness, in the passionate beauty of Greene's lyrics: one can understand with what a transport of relief he would throw himself out of his base surroundings into the dreams of a happy pastoral country and the music of sweet verse. There is nothing

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