art pant and quiver to remember that I
have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never
seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in
which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the
quiet close.

"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,
For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;
We'll give his mangled limbs due burial;
And all the students, clothed in mourning black
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."

Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in
every play. In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas. In _Edward
II_. it is Piers Gaveston. In _Edward II_. indeed, two elements are
mixed--the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the
purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in
which it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of
abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished
hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his _Richard II_; and the
death scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene,
ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives
the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom
in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career.

Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than
his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have
denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with
the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one
way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and
seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business. The _Atheist's
Tragedy_ of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us)
gives some measure of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to
the heroine,

"No? Then invoke
Your great supposed Protector. I will do't."

to which she:

"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then
I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain."

Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the
obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the
thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a
butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured
him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol
is fed and stuffed with r