This Granuffo is qualified among the “Interlocutors” as “a silent lord,” and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing.  It is plain enough that the passage should read, “a man of excellent discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abundantly,” etc.

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right.  But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,—­“gone before and swept the way.”  An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher.  A play written in our own tongue should not be as tough to us as Aeschylus to a ten-years’ graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all.  But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech of Erichtho, in the first scene of the fourth act of “Sophonisba,” (Vol.  I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in this shape:—­

——­“hard by the reverent (!) ruines Of a once glorious temple rear’d to Jove Whose very rubbish.... ....yet beares A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac’d, [razed,] Hurl’d down by wrath and lust of impious kings, So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow, The ill-voyc’d raven, and still chattering pye, Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth; Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs,

* * * * *

  Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men
  Stood in assured rest,” etc.

The verse and a half in Italics are worthy of Chapman; but why did not Mr. Halliwell, who explains up-pont and I um, change “Joves acts were vively limbs” to “Jove’s acts were lively limned,” which was unquestionably what Marston wrote?

In the “Scourge of Villanie,” (Vol.  III. p. 252,) there is a passage which has a modern application in America, though happily archaic in England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand thus:—­

  “Once Albion lived in such a cruel age
  Than man did hold by servile vilenage: 
  Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne,
  And marted, sold:  but that rude law is torne
  And disannuld, as too too inhumane.”

This should read—­

  “Man man did hold in servile villanage;
  Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were born)”;