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Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale,

His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments;

But no more like her oriental red

Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b}

Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks?

If she did blush, ’twas tender modest shame,

Being in the sacred presence of a king;

If he did blush, ’twas red immodest shame

To vail his eyes amiss, being a king;

If she looked pale, ’twas silly woman’s fear

To bear herself in presence of a king;

If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear

To dote amiss, being a mighty king.

This is better than the insufferable style of Locrine, which is in great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an empty verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it exactly; it is most tolerable—and not to be endured.

The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which the author’s two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friend Marlowe.

She is grown more fairer far since I came hither;

Her voice more silver every word than other,

Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse

Unfolded she of David and his Scots!

Even thus, quoth she, he spake—and then spake broad,

With epithets and accents of the Scot;

But somewhat better than the Scot could speak:

And thus, quoth she—and answered then herself;

For who could speak like her? but she herself

Breathes from the wall an angel’s note from heaven

Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes.

When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue

Commanded war to prison; when of war,

It wakened Cæsar from his Roman grave

To hear war beautified by her discourse.

Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue;

Beauty a slander, but in her fair face;

There is no summer but in her cheerful looks,

Nor frosty winter but in her disdain.

I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her,

For she is all the treasure of our land;

But call them cowards that they ran away,

Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.

But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning—

Now, Lodowick, invocate some golden Muse

To bring thee hither an enchanted pen;

and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will recognise at once the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be too often quoted.

If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,

Their minds, and muses on admirèd themes;

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,

Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive

The highest reaches of a human wit;

If these had made one poem’s period,

And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest.

Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty lines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator’s, yet we cannot choose but catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of the King to his parasite—

For so much moving hath a poet’s pen, etc., etc.

It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles at length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and there with something