and delightful volumes of lyrics from Elizabethan song-books; and higher
praise than this no lyrical poet could reasonably desire.

An inoffensive monomaniac, who thought fit to reprint a thing in
dramatic or quasi-dramatic form to which I have already referred in
passing--"Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt"--thought likewise fit to
attribute to John Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the
concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense. The fact
that one of the puppets in the puppet-show is supposed to represent a
sullen scholar, disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would have
suggested to a rational reader that the scribbler who gave vent to the
impotence of his rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious despair
had set himself to ape the habitual manner of Jonson and the occasional
manner of Marston with about as much success as might be expected from a
malignant monkey when attempting to reproduce in his grimaces the
expression of human indignation and contempt. But to students of natural
or literary history who cannot discern the human from the simious
element it suggests that the man thus imitated must needs have been the
imitator of himself; and the fact that the whole attempt at satire is
directed against dramatic poetry--that all the drivelling venom of a
dunce's denunciation, all the virulent slaver of his grovelling
insolence, is aimed at the stage for which Marston was employed in
writing--weighs nothing in the scales of imbecility against the
consideration that Marston's or Jonson's manner is here and there more
or less closely imitated; that we catch now and then some such echo of
his accent, some such savor of his style, as may be discovered or
imagined in the very few scattered lines which show any glimmer of
capacity for composition or versification. The eternal theme of envy,
invented by Jonson and worked to death by its inventor, was taken up
again by Marston and treated with a vigorous acerbity not always
unworthy of comparison with Jonson's; the same conception inspired with
something of eloquence the malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who
has left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rubbish, a line or two
like these which he has put into the mouth of his patron saint or
guardian goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy:

Turn, turn, thou lackey to the winged time!
I envy thee in that thou art so slow,
And I so swift to mischief.

But the entire affai