lowe's name has nothing to do with these obscure
scandals of three hundred years ago, though it may be difficult to pass
them over entirely. He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpieces
of English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not much
inferior. Except the very greatest names--Shakespere, Milton, Spenser,
Dryden, Shelley--no author can be named who has produced, when the proper
historical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in
_Tamburlaine_, _Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward the Second_,
in one department; _Hero and Leander_ and the _Passionate Shepherd_ in
another. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, play
of _Lust's Dominion_ is Marlowe's, though it may have been rewritten, and
the translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is more or less
probably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhaps
could not have written. For the one characteristic lacking to his genius
was measure, and prose without measure, as numerous examples have shown, is
usually rubbish. Even his dramas show a singular defect in the
architectural quality of literary genius. The vast and formless creations
of the writer's boundless fancy completely master him; his aspirations
after the immense too frequently leave him content with the simply
unmeasured. In his best play as a play, _Edward the Second_, the
limitations of a historical story impose something like a restraining form
on his glowing imagination. But fine as this play is, it is noteworthy that
no one of his greatest things occurs in it. _The Massacre at Paris_, where
he also has the confinement of reality after a fashion, is a chaotic thing
as a whole, without any great beauty in parts. _The Tragedy of Dido_ (to be
divided between him and Nash) is the worst thing he ever did. But in the
purely romantic subjects of _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, and _The Jew of
Malta_, his genius, untrammelled by any limits of story, showed itself
equally unable to contrive such limits for itself, and able to develop the
most marvellous beauties of detail. Shakespere himself has not surpassed,
which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous
and wonderful passages in _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_, which are familiar
to every student of English literature as examples of the _ne plus ultra_
of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragic
imagination in it