We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer us with so strenuous a hand.  But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust, not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of affectation or of self-indulgence.  His real interest and his real sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and manhood.  In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting.  There is an odd mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder:  and the two parts were published in the same year.  And indeed, except in “Parasitaster” and “The Dutch Courtesan,” a general defect in his unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the work of a professional and practised hand.  “What you Will” is modestly described as “a slight-writ play”:  but slight and slovenly are not the same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence.  I have already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather, we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the pefunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the time employed.  Now and then, however—­or perhaps it would be more accurate to say once or twice—­a gayer note is struck with a lighter touch than usual:  as, for instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put into the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the fifth act of the first part of “Antonio and Mellida.”  “You know, the stone called lapis, the nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and the bird which the geometricians call avis, the farther it is from the earth, the nearer it is to the heaven; and love, the nigher it is to the flame, the more remote (there’s a word, remote!)—­the more remote it is from the frost.”  Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism:  I cannot think their burlesque of his elaborate and sententious