spirit of young Marius. Garrick, in his stage version of our tragedy, taking some hints from Otway, varies from Shakspere, and expands the dialogue with some eighteenth century sentimentalities

"Rom. My powers are blasted,

'Twixt death and love I'm torn-I am distracted!

But death's strongest-and must I leave thee, Juliet !
Oh, cursed, cursed fate! in sight of heav'n-

Jul. Thou rav'st-lean on my breast

Rom. Fathers have flinty hearts, no tears can melt 'em.
Nature pleads in vain-children must be wretched."

It were presumptuous to say that had Shakspere been acquainted with the earlier form of the story-Da Porto's, which agrees in this particular with Garrick'she would have rejected it in favour of the form found in Brooke; and we can believe that a dialogue of marvellous beauty, pure poetry, and therefore unlike the effective stage nonsense of Garrick, might have been written. But we do not desire any variation from the scene as we have it. No unavailing lamentations are uttered by Juliet-there is but one agonised moment, that in which she perceives that the phial has been emptied, and fears she may not find the means to die. But in another instant the "happy dagger" is in her heart; and it is on Romeo's body that she falls.

And so the event is over; the star-crossed lovers have done with sorrow, and can never more be sepaOver their bodies kinsmen pledge a lasting

rated.

peace. They shall lie side by side in effigy, all of pure gold, for other lovers to look on. Their lives have been fulfilled; they are made one in all men's memories; it is not wholly ill with them.

Dawn widens over the

world, not bright, but with a grey tranquillity, as the grieved witnesses move away with hushed speech about the dead

"A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head :
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things."

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.*

THE study of Shakspere and his contemporaries is the study of one family consisting of many members, all of whom have the same life-blood in their veins, all of whom are recognisable by accent and bearing, and acquired habits, and various unconscious self-revealments as kinsmen, while each possesses a character of his own, and traits of mind and manners and expression which distinguish him from the rest. The interest of the study lies chiefly in the gradual apprehension, now on this side, now on that, of the common nature of this great family of writers, until we are in complete intellectual possession of it, and in tracing out the characteristics peculiar to each of its individuals. There is, perhaps, no other body of literature towards which we are attracted by so much of unity, and at the same time by so much of variety. If the school of Rubens had been composed of greater men than it was, we should have had an illustrious parallel in the history of painting to the group of Shakspere and his contemporaries in the history of poetry.

The "school of Rubens" we say; we could hardly speak with accuracy of the school of Shakspere."

* This essay was published in the Fortnightly Review many years ago, before the literary cult of Marlowe's genius had become the mode. The essay on Milton which follows was written as a companion study, each essay attempting to show how a great poet works, who is an idealist, rather than a naturalist or realist, in art.

Yet there can be little doubt that he was in a considerable degree the master of the inferior and younger artists who surrounded him. It is the independence of Ben Jonson's work and its thorough individuality, rather than comparative greatness or beauty of poetical achievement, which have given him a kind of acknowledged right to the second place amongst the Elizabethan dramatists, a title to vice-president's chair in the session. of the poets. His aims were different from those of the others, and at a time when plays and playwrights were little esteemed, he had almost a nineteenth-century sense of the dignity of art, and of his own art in particular :

"And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,

For his were called Works, where others were but Plays."

But Webster, and Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shirley (who were content, like Shakspere, to write " plays," and did not aspire to "works") are really followers of the greatest of all dramatic writers, and very different handiwork they would probably have turned out had they wrought in their craft without the teaching of his practice and example. Shakspere's immediate predecessors were men of no mean powers; but they are separated by a great gulf from his contemporaries and immediate successors. That tragedy is proportioned to something else than the number of slaughtered bodies piled upon the stage at the end of act five, that comedy has store of mirth more vital, deeper, happier, more human than springs

from

"Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay"

these were discoveries in art made by Shakspere; and
is it too much to suppose that but for him these dis-
coveries might have come later by a dozen years or
more? The works of the pre-Shaksperians are of
small interest for the most part, except as illustrating
a necessary stage of growth in the history of the drama.
They do not win upon us with the charm, the singleness
of aim, the divine innocency, the sacred inexperience,
the unction of art, which we are sensible of in the

works of Raphael's predecessors. Italian painting may
be personified under the figure of a royal maiden who,
after a period of chaste seclusion and tender virginity,
came forth into the world, and was a queen and mother
of men.
The English drama was, first, a schoolboy,
taught rude piety by the priests, and rude jokes by his
fellows; then a young man, lusty, passionate, mettle-
some, riotous, aspiring, friendly, full of extravagant no-
tions and huffing words, given to irregular ways and
disastrous chances and desperate recoveries, but, like
Shakspere's wild prince, containing the promise of that
grave, deep-thoughted, and magnificent manhood which
was afterwards realised.

It is, however, amongst the pre-Shaksperians that we find the man who, of all the Elizabethan dramatists, stands next to Shakspere in poetical stature, the one man who, if he had lived longer and accomplished the work which lay clear before him, might have stood even beside Shakspere, as supreme in a different province of dramatic art. Shakspere would have been master of the realists or naturalists; Marlowe, master of the idealists. The starting-point of Shakspere, and of those who

.

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