count in verse as a word of three syllables:  I can hardly believe that the fancy would sound sweet in any second man’s ear:  but this speciality is not more characteristic than other and more important qualities of style—­the peculiar abruptness, the peculiar inflation, the peculiar crudity—­which denote this comedy as apparently if not evidently Marstonian.  On the other hand, if it were indeed his, it is impossible to conjecture why his name should have been withheld from the title-page; and it must not be forgotten that even our own day is not more fertile than was Marston’s in the generation of that slavish cattle which has always since the age of Horace fed ravenously and thievishly on the pasture-land of every poet who has discovered or reclaimed a field or a province of his own.

But our estimate of John Marston’s rank or regiment in the noble army of contemporary poets will not be in any way affected by acceptance or rejection of any apocryphal addition to the canon of his writings.  For better and for worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them will suffice to decide that question beyond all chance of intelligent or rational dispute.  His rank is high in his own regiment; and the colonel of that regiment is Ben Jonson.  At first sight he may seem rather to belong to that brighter and more famous one which has Webster among its captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Heywood among its privates, and Shakespeare at its head.  Nor did he by any means follow the banner of Jonson with such automatic fidelity as that imperious martinet of genius was wont to exact from those who came to be “sealed of the tribe of Ben.”  A rigid critic—­a critic who should push rigidity to the verge of injustice—­might say that he was one of those recruits in literature whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools—­to halt between two courses.  It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson.  But it is no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that line except “Sejanus his Fall” and “Catiline his Conspiracy.”  It is superfluous to add that “Volpone” was an achievement only less far out of his reach than “Hamlet.”  But this is not to say or to imply that he does not deserve an honorable place among English poets.  His savage and unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious rhetoric.  The restless rage of his invective is as far as human utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago.  Of him we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more potent and more truculent satirist: 

   An honest man he is, and hates the slime
   That sticks on filthy deeds.