for one have often been disposed, to wonder
beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard
of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most
fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since
Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the
nineteenth century, it cannot but seem strange that comparatively so few
should have availed themselves of the entry to so rich and royal an
estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. Dyce made the rough ways plain and
the devious paths straight for all serious and worthy students. And now
again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task than which none more arduous and
important, none worthier of thanks and praise, can be undertaken by an
English scholar. In his beautiful and valuable edition of Marlowe there
are but two points to which exception may be taken. It was, I think, a
fault of omission to exclude the apocryphal play of "Lust's Dominion"
from a place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a fault of
commission to admit instead of it the much bepuffed and very puffy
rubbish of the late Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic
writer never went so far out of his depth or floundered so pitifully in
such perilous waters as when he ventured to put verses of his own into
the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors we must all hope to see
rectified in a second issue of the text: and meantime we can but welcome
with all possible gratitude and applause the magnificent series of old
plays by unknown writers which we owe to the keen research and the fine
appreciation of Marlowe's latest editor. Of these I may find some future
occasion to speak: my present business is with the admirable poet who
has been promoted to the second place in Mr. Bullen's collection of the
English dramatists.

The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may
probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic
literature. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised
the editor "to begin with the collected plays of Heywood": which as yet,
like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious
or scholarly sense of the term. The existing reprints merely reproduce,
without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text
of the worst early editions: while Middleton has for upward of half a
century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accoun