If the apparently apocryphal Mountebank’s Masque be really the work of Marston—­and it is both coarse enough and clever enough to deserve the attribution of his authorship—­there is a singular echo in it from the opening of Jonson’s “Poetaster,” the furious dramatic satire which blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned.  In it, after a full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose declamatory address begins with these words: 

   Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity,
   The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe;
   I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now,
   Enforced by Fate.

Few readers of these lines will forget the verses with which Envy plays prologue to “Poetaster; or, his Arraignment”: 

   Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
   Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness.

Whoever may be the author of this masque, there are two or three couplets well worth remembrance in one of the two versions of its text: 

   It is a life is never ill
   To lie and sleep in roses still.

* * * * *

   Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
   Or who grew ever weary of the spring? 
   The day must have her night, the spring her fall,
   All is divided, none is lord of all.

These verses are worthy of a place in any one of Mr. Bullen’s beautiful and delightful volumes of lyrics from Elizabethan song-books; and higher praise than this no lyrical poet could reasonably desire.

An inoffensive monomaniac, who thought fit to reprint a thing in dramatic or quasi-dramatic form to which I have already referred in passing—­“Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt”—­thought likewise fit to attribute to John Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense.  The fact that one of the puppets in the puppet-show is supposed to represent a sullen scholar, disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would have suggested to a rational reader that the scribbler who gave vent to the impotence of his rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious despair had set himself to ape the habitual manner of Jonson and the occasional manner of Marston with about as much success as might be expected from a malignant monkey when attempting to reproduce in his grimaces the expression of human indignation and contempt.  But to students of natural or literary history who cannot discern the human from the simious element it suggests that the man thus imitated must needs have been the imitator of himself; and the fact that the whole attempt at satire is directed against dramatic poetry—­that all the drivelling venom of a dunce’s denunciation, all the virulent slaver of his grovelling insolence, is aimed at the stage for which Marston was employed