Mindful of the good old apologue regarding “the squeak of the real pig,” I think it here worth while to certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterances from the “pink soft litter” of a living brood—­from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper.  One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity.  Let it stand here once more on record as “a good jest for ever”—­or rather as the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be cracked between this and the crack of doom.  Sophocles, said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient tragedians:  AEschylus—­hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!—­AEschylus was only a Marlowe.

The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher Marlowe:  it has never—­be the humble avowal thus blushingly recorded—­it has never set down as the writer’s opinion that he was only an AEschylus.  In other words, it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews; who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare.

Footnotes.

{30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of Greene’s works.

{33} One thing is certain:  that damnable last scene at which the gorge rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of Shakespeare’s style as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of his spirit.  Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done in even tolerably good verse.

{42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay’s offences against art that he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if “brawny” Wycherley—­a classification almost to be paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue.  Any competent critic will always recognise in The Way of the World one of the glories, in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of