s of a new dramatic style
are evident. Faults and beauties are more or less common to the whole
quartet. In all we find the many-sided activity of the Shakesperian drama
as it was to be, sprawling and struggling in a kind of swaddling clothes of
which it cannot get rid, and which hamper and cripple its movements. In all
there is present a most extraordinary and unique rant and bombast of
expression which reminds one of the shrieks and yells of a band of healthy
boys just let out to play. The passages which (thanks chiefly to Pistol's
incomparable quotations and parodies of them) are known to every one, the
"Pampered jades of Asia," the "Have we not Hiren here," the "Feed and grow
fat, my fair Callipolis," the other quips and cranks of mine ancient are
scattered broadcast in their originals, and are evidently meant quite
seriously throughout the work of these poets. Side by side with this mania
for bombast is another mania, much more clearly traceable to education and
associations, but specially odd in connection with what has just been
noticed. This is the foible of classical allusion. The heathen gods and
goddesses, the localities of Greek and Roman poetry, even the more
out-of-the-way commonplaces of classical literature, are put in the mouths
of all the characters without the remotest attempt to consider propriety or
relevance. Even in still lesser peculiarities the blemishes are uniform and
constant--such as the curious and childish habit of making speakers speak
of themselves in the third person, and by their names, instead of using "I"
and "me." And on the other hand, the merits, though less evenly distributed
in degree, are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, in
Peele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and passages of blinding
and dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium.
Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which have
followed Lamb's _Specimens_, to all readers. Such, for instance, is the

"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament"

of Marlowe, and his even more magnificent passage beginning

"If all the pens that ever poets held;"

such Peele's exquisite bower,

"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,"

which is, with all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score of
other jewels from the reckless work of "George Pyeboard": such Greene's

"Why thinks King Henry's son that Margaret's love
Ha