motives, their irrational doings and sufferings. The humor of
the underplot constantly verges on horse-play, and is certainly neither
delicate nor profound; but there is matter enough for mirth in it to
make the reader duly grateful for the patient care and admirable insight
which Mr. Bullen has brought to bear upon the really formidable if
apparently trivial task of reducing the chaotic corruption and confusion
of the text to reasonable form and comprehensible order. William
Barkstead, a narrative poet of real merit, and an early minister at the
shrine of Shakespeare, has been credited with the authorship of this
play: I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of its latest
editor--its first editor in any serious sense of the word--that both he
and Marston may have had a hand in it. His "Myrrha" belongs to the same
rather morbid class of poems as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and
Marston's "Pygmalion's Image." Of the three Shakespeare's is not more
certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it
is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on
the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only
be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess
by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French
photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private
letter--long since addressed to the present commentator by the most
illustrious of writers on art.)

There are some pretty verses and some ingenious touches in Marston's
"Entertainment," offered to Lady Derby by her daughter and son-in-law;
but the Latinity of his city pageant can scarcely have satisfied the
pupil of Buchanan, unless indeed the reputation of King James's tutor
as a Latin versifier or master of prosody has been scandalously usurped
under the falsest of pretences: a matter on which I am content to accept
the verdict of Landor. His contribution to Sir Robert Chester's
problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being
more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more
inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the "divers poetical
essays--done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their
names subscribed to their particular works," in which Marston has the
honor to stand next to Shakespeare; and however far he may be from any
pretention to rival the incomparable charm of Shakespeare's open