Doctor Faustus.—­The growing horrors of Faustus’s last scene are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact.  It is indeed an agony and a fearful colluctation.  Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity.  To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food:  to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf, near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge.[1] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects.  They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction.  But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect; and, themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be death to others.  Milton, in the person of Satan, has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armory of the atheist ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have invented.

[Footnote 1:  Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.—­Howell’s Letters.]

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THOMAS DECKER.

Old Fortunatus.—­The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himself, being a prisoner in the English king’s court, is enamored to frenzy of the king’s daughter Agripyna, is done to the life.  Orleans is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew.  He is just such another adept in Love’s reasons.  The sober people of the world are with him,

                  “A swarm of fools
  Crowding together to be counted wise.”

He talks “pure Biron and Romeo;” he is almost as poetical as they, quite as philosophical, only a little madder.  After all, Love’s sectaries are a reason unto themselves.  We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease:  the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind’s religion; the liberal superstition.