The humor of the underplot constantly verges on horse-play, and is certainly neither delicate nor profound; but there is matter enough for mirth in it to make the reader duly grateful for the patient care and admirable insight which Mr. Bullen has brought to bear upon the really formidable if apparently trivial task of reducing the chaotic corruption and confusion of the text to reasonable form and comprehensible order.  William Barkstead, a narrative poet of real merit, and an early minister at the shrine of Shakespeare, has been credited with the authorship of this play:  I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of its latest editor—­its first editor in any serious sense of the word—­that both he and Marston may have had a hand in it.  His “Myrrha” belongs to the same rather morbid class of poems as Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” and Marston’s “Pygmalion’s Image.”  Of the three Shakespeare’s is not more certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on the score of style and treatment.  Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” can only be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess by those “who can see no difference between Titian and French photographs.” (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private letter—­long since addressed to the present commentator by the most illustrious of writers on art.)

There are some pretty verses and some ingenious touches in Marston’s “Entertainment,” offered to Lady Derby by her daughter and son-in-law; but the Latinity of his city pageant can scarcely have satisfied the pupil of Buchanan, unless indeed the reputation of King James’s tutor as a Latin versifier or master of prosody has been scandalously usurped under the falsest of pretences:  a matter on which I am content to accept the verdict of Landor.  His contribution to Sir Robert Chester’s problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the “divers poetical essays—­done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular works,” in which Marston has the honor to stand next to Shakespeare; and however far he may be from any pretention to rival the incomparable charm of Shakespeare’s opening quatrain—­incomparable in its peculiar melody and mystery except with other lyrics of Shakespeare’s or of Shelley’s, it must, I think, be admitted that an impartial student of both effusions will assign to Marston rather than to Shakespeare the palm of distinction on the score of tortuous obscurity and enigmatic verbiage.  It may be—­as it seems to me—­equally difficult to make sense of the greater and the lesser poet’s riddles and rhapsodies; but on the whole I cannot think that Shakespeare’s will be found so desperately indigestible by the ordinary intelligence of manhood as Marston’s.  “The turtles fell to work, and ate each other up,” in a far more comprehensible and reasonable poem of Hood’s; and most readers of Chester’s poem and the verses appended to it will be inclined to think that it might have been as well—­except for a few lines of Shakespeare’s and of Jonson’s which we could not willingly spare—­if the Phoenix and Turtle had set them the example.