Southwell is, if possible, worse.  He paraphrases David and puts into his mouth such punning conceits as “Fears are my feres,” and in his “Saint Peter’s Complaint” makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus.  It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses.  We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit’s poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree.  The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs.  It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified by the adjective.  To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their company,—­to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs,—­nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun’s rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary’s drawer.  The “Enchiridion” of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the “Emblems,” and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,—­nor a matter of heartbreak, if it were so.  Of the dramatic works of Marston it is enough to say that they are truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor worth the paper they blot.  He seems to have been deemed worthy of republication because he was the contemporary of true poets; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy his plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one.  The Homer of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith’s shortcomings in consideration of it.  It is a vast placer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry.