catalogue upon such a title as “Jocondo and Astolfo.”  How on earth the famous story of Giocondo could possibly be adapted for representation on the public stage of Shakespearean London is a mystery which the execrable cook of the execrable Warburton has left forever insoluble and inconceivable:  for to that female fiend, the object of Sir Walter Scott’s antiquarian imprecations, we owe, unless my memory misguides me, the loss of this among other irredeemable treasures.

To do justice upon the faults of this poet is easy for any sciolist:  to do justice to his merits is less easy for the most competent scholar and the most appreciative critic.  In despite of his rare occasional spurts or outbreaks of self-assertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us a man of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, irritable and placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed, and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected.  There is no unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often—­nay, too constantly—­in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.  What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or to conjecture:  what he has done, with all its shortcomings and infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place among the humorists and the poets of his country.

JOHN MARSTON

If justice has never been done, either in his own day or in any after age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in great part his own fault.  Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his intelligence or in his temperament:  some taint or some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason.  And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an independent and remarkable poet.  The praise and the blame, the admiration and the distaste excited by his works, are equally just, but are seemingly incompatible:  the epithets most exactly appropriate to the style of one scene, one page, one speech in a scene or one passage in a speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the next.  An anthology of such noble and beautiful excerpts might be collected from