in writing—­weighs nothing in the scales of imbecility against the consideration that Marston’s or Jonson’s manner is here and there more or less closely imitated; that we catch now and then some such echo of his accent, some such savor of his style, as may be discovered or imagined in the very few scattered lines which show any glimmer of capacity for composition or versification.  The eternal theme of envy, invented by Jonson and worked to death by its inventor, was taken up again by Marston and treated with a vigorous acerbity not always unworthy of comparison with Jonson’s; the same conception inspired with something of eloquence the malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who has left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rubbish, a line or two like these which he has put into the mouth of his patron saint or guardian goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy: 

   Turn, turn, thou lackey to the winged time! 
   I envy thee in that thou art so slow,
   And I so swift to mischief.

But the entire affair is obviously an effusion and an example of the same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance in other contemporary protests of the universities against the universe.  In that abyss of dulness “The Return from Parnassus,” a reader or a diver who persists in his thankless toil will discover this pearl of a fact—­that men of culture had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron to Shelley.  The author of the one deserves to have been the author of the other.  Nobody can have been by nature such a fool as to write either:  art, education, industry, and study were needful to achieve such composite perfection of elaborate and consummate idiocy.

There is a good deal of bad rubbish, and there is some really brilliant and vigorous writing, in the absurdly named and absurdly constructed comedy of “Jack Drum’s Entertainment”; but in all other points—­in plot, incident, and presentation of character—­it is so scandalously beneath contempt that I am sorry to recognize the hand of Marston in a play which introduces us to a “noble father,” the model of knightly manhood and refined good sense, who on the news of a beloved daughter’s disappearance instantly proposes to console himself with a heavy drinking-bout.  No graver censure can be passed on the conduct of the drama than the admission that this monstrous absurdity is not out of keeping with the rest of it.  There is hardly a single character in all its rabble rout of lunatics who behaves otherwise than would beseem a probationary candidate for Bedlam.  Yet I fear there is more serious evidence of a circumstantial kind in favor of the theory which would saddle the fame of Marston with the charge of its authorship than such as depends on peculiarities of metre and eccentricities of phrase.  Some other poet—­though I know of none such—­may have accepted and adopted his theory that “vengeance” must