editor observes, “the parallel” between Tourneur and Marston, “as far as it goes, is so obvious that it is not worth drawing,” it is no less certain that the diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or affinity between them are vivid and distinct.  While Marston’s imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified it—­perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson’s unmerciful but salutary ridicule—­he approved himself a far abler writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had forgotten its cunning as the hand of “a tragic penman.”  Now the improvement of Tourneur’s style, an improvement amounting to little less than transfiguration, keeps time with his advance as a student of character and a tragic dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet.  The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, of facility, and of freshness:  the style of his later play, I must repeat, is comparable only with Shakespeare’s.  In the superb and inexhaustible imprecations of Timon there is a quality which reminds us of Cyril Tourneur as delightfully as we are painfully reminded of John Marston in reading certain scenes and passages which disfigure and deface the magnificent but incomprehensible composition of “Troilus and Cressida.”

Of Tourneur’s two elegies on the death of Sir Francis Vere and of Henry Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman’s work of the same order:  and it may be added that his first editor has shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic in the elegiac expression of the poet’s regret for a prince of such noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common courtesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of such unqualified severity on the lamentation of Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the Good:  and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented person will scarcely maintain that this loss was of such grave importance to England as the loss of a prince who might probably have preserved the country from the alternate oppression of prelates and of Puritans, from the social tyranny of a dictator and the political disgrace of the Restoration.

The existence of a comedy by the author of “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” and of a comedy bearing the suggestive if not provocative title of “Laugh and Lie Down,” must always have seemed to the students of Lowndes one of the most curious and amusing pieces of information to be gathered from the “Bibliographer’s Manual”; and it is with a sense of disappointment proportionate to this sense of curiosity that they will discover the non-existence of such a comedy, and the existence in its stead of a mere pamphlet