native, and more humane than had ever before been directed to dramatic composition.

The immediate predecessors of Shakespeare-Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe - were all educated at the Universities, and were naturally prejudiced in favor of the classics. But they were, at the same time, wild Bohemian youths, thrown upon the world of London to turn their talents and accomplishments into the means of livelihood or the means of debauch. They depended principally on the popular theatres, and of course addressed the popular mind. Why, indeed, should they write according to the rules of the classic drama? The classic drama was a growth from the life of the times in which it appeared. Its rules were simply generalizations from the practice of classic dramatists. A drama suited to the tastes and wants of the people of Greece or Rome was evidently not suited to the tastes and wants of the people of England. The whole framework of society, customs, manners, feelings, aspirations, traditions, superstitions, religion, had changed; and, as the drama is a reflection of life, either as actually existing or ideally existing, it is evident that both the experience and the sentiments of the English audiences demanded that it should be the reflection of a new life. These dramatists, however, in emancipating themselves from the literary jurisprudence of Greece

and Rome, put little but individual caprice in its place. Released from formal rules, they did not rise into the artistic region of principles, but fell into the pit of anarchy and mere lawlessness. Lacking the higher imagination which conceives living ideas and organizes living works, their dramas evince no coherence, no subordination of parts, no grasp of the subject as a whole. There is a German play in which Adam is represented as passing across the stage, "going to be created." The drama of the age of Elizabeth, in the persons of Greene, Peele, Kyd, and others, indicates, in some such rude way, that it is "going to be created."

That this dramatic shapelessness was not inconsistent with single poetic conceptions of the greatest force and fineness, might be proved by abundant quotations. Lodge, for example, was a poor dramatist; but what living poet would not be proud to own this exquisite description, in his lyric of "Rosaline," of the person and influence of beauty?

"Like to the clear in highest sphere,

Where all imperial glory shines,

Of selfsame color is her hair,

Whether unfolded or in twines.

"Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink;
The gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble when I think.

"Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora's face;

Or like the silver-crimson shroud,

That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace

"Her lips are like two budded roses,

Whom ranks of lilies neighbor nigh,

Within which bounds she balm encloses,
Apt to entice a deity.

Her neck like to a stately tower,

Where Love himself imprisoned lies,

To watch for glances every hour

From her divine and sacred eyes.

"With orient pearl, with ruby red,

With marble white, with sapphire blue,

Her body everyway is fed,

Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view.

"Nature herself her shape admires;

The gods are wounded in her sight;
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires,

And at her eyes his brand doth light."

But a more potent spirit than any we have men、 tioned, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors, was Christopher Marlowe, a man of humble parentage, but with Norman blood in his brains, if not in his veins. He was, indeed, the proudest and fiercest of intellectual aristocrats. The son of a shoemaker, and born in 1564, his unmistakable genius seems to have gained him

friends, who looked after his early education, and sent him, at the age of seventeen, to the University of Cambridge. He was intended for the Church, but the Church had evidently no attractions for him. The study of theology appears to have resulted in making him an enemy of religion. There was, indeed, hardly a Chris tian element in his untamable nature; and, though he was called a sceptic, infidelity in him took the form of blasphemy rather than of denial. He was made up of vehement passions, vivid imagination, and lawless self-will; and what Hazlitt calls "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness" assumed the place of conscience in his haughty and fiery spirit. Before the age of twenty-three we find him in London, an actor and a writer for the stage, and the author of the "great sensation work" of his time, the tragedy of "Tamburlaine." This portentous melodrama, a strange compound of inspiration and desperation, has the mark of power equally on its absurdities and its sublimities. The first play written in blank verse for the popular stage, its verse has an elasticity, freedom, and variety of movement which makes it as much the product of Marlowe's mind as the thoughts and passions it conveys. It had no precedent in the verse of preceding writers, and is constructed, not on mechanical rules, but on vital principles. It is the effort of a glowing mind, disdaining to

creep along paths previously made, and opening a new path for itself. This scornful intellectual daring, the source of Marlowe's originality, is also the source of his defects. In the tragedy of "Tamburlaine" he selects for his hero a character through whom he can express his own extravagant impatience of physical obstacles and moral restraints. No regard is paid to reality, even in the dramatic sense of the word: a shaggy and savage force dominates over everything. The writer seems to say, with his truculent hero, "This is my mind, and I will have it so." This self-asserting intellectual insolence is accompanied by an unwearied energy, which half redeems the bombast into which it runs, or rather rushes; and strange gleams of the purest splendors of poetry are continually transfiguring the bully into the bard.

Thus, in the celebrated scene in which Tamburlaine is represented in a chariot drawn by captive kings, and berating them for their slowness in words which so captivated Ancient Pistol, there is a glorious stroke of impassioned imagination, which makes us almost forgive the swaggering fustian which precedes and follows it:

"Hallo! ye pampered jades of Asia!

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven,