which it touches, because it does not touch them all:  for the whole must be moved at once, else there can be no great moving of any part.  No, no! there was not, there could not have been in Marlowe, great as he was, a tithe of Shakespeare, for tragedy, nor any thing else.  To go no further, he was, as we have seen, destitute of humour; the powers of comedy evidently had no place in him; and these powers are indispensable to the production of high tragedy:  a position affirmed as long ago as the days of Plato; sound in the reason of the thing; and, above all, made good in the instance of Shakespeare; who was Shakespeare, mainly because he had all the powers of the human mind in harmonious order and action, and used them all, explicitly or implicitly, in every play he wrote.

* * * * *

Shakespeare had one or two other senior contemporaries of whom I must say a few words, though it is not likely that they contributed much, if any thing, towards preparing him.  John Lily, born in 1554, and Master of Arts in 1576, has considerable wit, some poetry; withal a certain crisp, clever, conceited mannerism of style, which caused him to be spoken of as “eloquent and witty”; but nothing that can be properly termed dramatic talent.  His persons all speak in precisely the same vein, being indeed but so many empty figures or puppets, reflecting or propagating the motions of the author himself.  His dramatic pieces, of which we have nine, seven in prose, one in rhyme, and one in blank-verse, seem to have been designed for Court entertainments, but were used more or less on the public stage, chiefly by the juvenile companies.  They are all replete with that laboured affectation of fine writing which was distinguished at the time as Euphuism.  One of his main peculiarities stands in using, for images and illustrations, certain imaginary products of a sort of artificial nature, which he got up especially for that purpose; as if he could invent better materials for poetic imagery than ancient Nature had furnished!  Still, it is not unlikely that we owe to him somewhat of the polish and flexibility of the Shakespearian dramatic diction:  that he could have helped the Poet in any thing beyond mere diction it were absurd to suppose.

I have already spoken of Thomas Lodge as joint author with Greene of a good-for-nothing play.  We have one Other play by him, entitled The Wounds of Civil War, and having for its subject “the true tragedies of Harms and Sylla,” written before 1590, but not printed till 1594.  It is in blank-verse; which however differs from the most regular rhyming ten-syllable verse in nothing but the lack of consonous endings.—­Lodge is chiefly memorable in that one of his prose pieces was drawn upon for Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

* * * * *