Had every copy of Marlowe’s boyish version or perversion of Ovid’s Elegies deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits—­hardly relieved, as his first competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a fine and felicitous couplet—­could in that case have been imagined.  His translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note of poetry and lifted into a higher mood of verse.  Its terseness, vigor, and purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line.  The really startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account.

One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in the whole range of descriptive and fanciful poetry would have secured a place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his plays had perished with himself.  His “Passionate Shepherd” remains ever since unrivalled in its way—­a way of pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse.  The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by the greatest lyric poet of England—­by Shelley alone.  Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,” closing with the sunrise which closes the night of the lovers’ union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of Milton.  In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious ease and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of separate lines or passages.

The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to overestimate.  To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted.  Nor was ever any great writer’s influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good.  He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man’s before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton’s.  He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature.  Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine tragedy in our language.  After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare.