ngs in the uncertain balance of proud time?"

such even Kyd's

"There is a path upon your left hand side
That leadeth from a guilty conscience
Unto a forest of distrust and fear."

But the whole point of the thing is that these flashes, which are not to be
found at all before the date of this university school, are to be found
constantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incomplete
as those productions are, they still show _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_ in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology may
read _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ through without discerning
the slightest signs of what was coming.

Nash and Lodge are so little dramatists (the chief, if not only play of the
former being the shapeless and rather dull comedy, _Will Summer's
Testament_, relieved only by some lyrics of merit which are probably not
Nash's, while Lodge's _Marius and Sylla_, while it wants the extravagance,
wants also the beauty of its author's companions' work), that what has to
be said about them will be better said later in dealing with their other
books. Greene's prose pieces and his occasional poems are, no doubt, better
than his drama, but the latter is considerable, and was probably his
earliest work. Kyd has left nothing, and Peele little, but drama; while
beautiful as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is, I do not quite understand how
any one can prefer it to the faultier but far more original dramas of its
author. We shall therefore deal with these four individually here.

The eldest of the four was George Peele, variously described as a Londoner
and a Devonshire man, who was probably born about 1558. He was educated at
Christ's Hospital (of which his father was "clerk") and at Broadgates Hall,
now Pembroke College, Oxford, and had some credit in the university as an
arranger of pageants, etc. He is supposed to have left Oxford for London
about 1581, and had the credit of living a Bohemian, not to say
disreputable, life for about seventeen years; his death in 1597(?) being
not more creditable than his life. But even the scandals about Peele are
much more shadowy than those about Marlowe and Greene. His dramatic work
consists of some half-dozen plays, the earliest of which is _The
Arraignment of Paris_, 1581(?), one of the most elaborate and barefaced of
the many contemporary flatteries of Elizabeth, but containing some
exquisite verse. In the same way Peele has