;
it was written in his youth, while he was a priest, before he fell under
grave suspicion of heresy, and we may be sure it was relished by his
brother priests in the Dominican monastery. To draw from this youthful
_jeu d'e'sprit_, a theory of Bruno's attitude towards women is a
grotesque absurdity. We have his fine sonnets written in England,
especially the one "Inscribed to the most Virtuous and Delightful
Ladies," in which he celebrates the beauty, sweetness, and chastity
of our English "spouses and daughters of angelic birth." Still more
striking is the eulogy in his "Canticle of the Shining Ones." Bruno,
like every poet, was susceptible to love; but he was doomed to wander,
and the affection of wife and babes was not for him. So he made
Philosophy his mistress, and his devotion led him to the stake. Surely
there was a prescience of his fate in the fine apostrophe of his _Heroic
Rapture_--"O worthy love of the beautiful! O desire for the divine!
lend me thy wings; bring me to the dayspring, to the clearness of the
young morning; and the outrage of the rabble, the storms of Time, the
slings and arrows of Fortune, shall fall upon this tender body and shall
weld it to steel."

KIT MARLOWE AND JESUS CHRIST. *

* December, 1888.

Christopher Marlowe, whose "mighty line" was celebrated by Ben Jonson,
is one of the glories of English literature. He was the morning star
of our drama, which gives us the highest place in modern poetry.
He definitively made our blank verse, which it only remained for
Shakespeare to improve with his infinite variety; and although
his daring, passionate genius was extinguished at the early age of
twenty-nine, it has reverent admirers among the best and greatest
critics of English literature. Many meaner luminaries have had their
monuments while Marlowe's claims have been neglected; but there is now
a project on foot to erect something in honor of his memory, and the
committee includes the names of Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne.

This project evokes a howl from an anonymous Christian in the columns of
the _Pall Mall Gazette_. He protests against the "grotesque indecency
of such a scheme," and stigmatises Marlowe as "a disreputable scamp, who
lived a scandalous life and died a disgraceful death." That Marlowe was
"a scamp" we have on the authority of those who denounced his scepticism
and held him up as a frightful warning. His fellow poets, like Chapman
and Drayton, spoke