at the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and
distinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays.
Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the _Second
Part of King Henry VI_. are not to be found in the corresponding scene of
the first part of the _Contention_; yet, whether they belong to the
original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the
revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely
unmistakable:--

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night--

_Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus_; it is inconceivable that any
imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of
his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who
might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the
voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is
not the fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist. No
parasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds his starveling
talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, scraps, the bits and
greasy relics" of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrot-like
note of plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong
argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he
had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--that
in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the
influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his
manner, may perpetually be traced--I have already shown that I should be
the last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as
this, I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation
of emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of this
passage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare's
style as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the manner
of the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that it
is--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against
the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this
there is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald and
flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of
stage business