“O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,”

nor is there any thing in Marlowe that does.  In the passage quoted, however, (and there are many more like it,) we have the rhymeless ten-syllable iambic verse as the basis; but this is continually diversified, so as to relieve the ear and keep it awake, by occasional spondees, dibrachs, anapests, and amphibrachs, and by the frequent use of trochees in all parts of the verse, but especially at the beginning, and by a skilful shifting of the pause to any part of the line.  It thus combines the natural ease and variety of prose with the general effect of metrical harmony, so that the hearing does not surfeit nor tire.  As to the general poetic style of the performance, the kindling energy of thought and language that often beats and flashes along the sentences, there is much both in this and in Faustus to justify the fine enthusiasm of Drayton: 

    “Next, Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
    Had in him those brave translunary things
    That the first poets had:  his raptures were
    All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
    For that fine madness still he did retain
    Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

Before leaving the subject, I must notice a remark by Charles Lamb,—­the dear, delightful Charley.  “The reluctant pangs,” says he, “of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his Richard the Second; and the death-scene of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.”  Both the scenes in question have indeed great merit, but this praise seems to me far beyond the mark.  Surely, there is more of genuine, pity-moving pathos in the single speech of York,—­“As in a theatre the eyes of men,” etc.,—­than in all Marlowe’s writings put together.  And as to the moving of terror, there is, to my mind, nothing in Edward the Second that comes up to Faustus; and there are a dozen scenes in Macbeth, any one of which has more of the terrific than the whole body of Faustus.  And in the death-scene of Edward, it can hardly be denied that the senses are somewhat overcrammed with images of physical suffering, so as to give the effect rather of the horrible than the terrible.

Others, again, have thought that Marlowe, if he had lived, would have made some good approach to Shakespeare in tragic power.  A few years more would no doubt have lifted him to very noble things, that is, provided his powers could have been kept from the eatings and cripplings of debauchery; still, any approach to that great Divinity of the Drama was out of the question for him.  For, judging from his life and works, the moral part of genius was constitutionally defective in him; and, with this so defective, the intellectual part cannot be truly itself; and his work must needs be comparatively weak in those points of our being