en
proceeds to enjoy all that the new order of things promised. He
commands Homer to come from the realm of shades to sing his entrancing
songs. He summons Helen to appear before him in the morning of her
beauty. The apostrophe to her shows the vividness and exuberance of
his imagination:--

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
* * * * *
Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

Marlowe left a fragment of a lyrical poem, entitled _Hero and
Leander_, which is one of the finest productions of its kind in the
language. Shakespeare accorded him the unusual honor of quoting from
this poem.

In What Sense is Marlowe a Founder of the English Drama?--His
success with blank verse showed Shakespeare that this was the proper
versification for the drama. Before Marlowe, rime or prose had been
chiefly employed in writing plays. Sackville had used blank verse in
_Gorboduc_, but his verse and Marlowe's are as unlike as the movements
of the ox and the flight of the swallow. The sentences of _Gorboduc_
generally end with the line, and the accents usually fall in the same
place. Marlowe's blank verse shows great variety, and the major pause
frequently does not come at the end of the line.

Marlowe cast the dramatic unities to the wind. The action in _Dr.
Faustus_ occupies twenty-four years, and the scene changes from
country to country. He knew that he was speaking to a people whose
imaginations could accompany him and interpret what he uttered. The
other dramatists followed him in placing imaginative interpretation
above measurements by the foot rule of the intellect. Symonds says of
him: "It was he who irrevocably decided the destinies of the romantic
drama; and the whole subsequent evolution of that species, including
Shakespeare's work, can be regarded as the expansion, rectification,
and artistic ennoblement of the type fixed by Marlowe's epoch-making
tragedies. In very little more than fifty years from the publication
of _Tamburlaine_, our drama had run its course of unparalleled energy
and splendor."

_General Characteristics_.--As we sum up Marlowe's general qualities,
it is well to note that they exhibit in a striking way the
characteristics of the time. In the morning of that youthful age the
superlative was possible. _Tamburlaine_, _The Jew of