While these authors had been gradually but imperceptibly improving and developing the infant drama of England, we now come to the great writer who performed for our stage nearly the same offices as were rendered to that of Greece, according to the well known dictum of Horace, by Eschylus :

"Et docuit magnumque loqui, nitique cothurno."

This was Christopher Marlow. Born at Canterbury, about the year 1562, he received a learned education at Bene't College, Cambridge, and is supposed to have been attracted by the reputation he had obtained by his first dramatic essay, the tragedy of 'Tamburlaine,' to embrace the profession of actor. The play to which we have just alluded was calculated, from the wild oriental nature of its subject, to give a too free current to Marlow's natural tendency to bombastic fury of declamation, and gigantic monstrosity and exaggeration of sentiment. Jonson has left on record his admiration for "Marlow's mighty line," as he so nobly expresses the peculiar character of this dramatist's wild and swelling spirit; and the Eschylus of the English stage, like his great Athenian prototype, seems to have impressed his contemporaries with a most exalted respect for his sublime and irregular genius. Indeed it may easily be conceived that, as grandeur and force are the qualities most likely to strike the imagination of the public at a period when art is in its infancy, so the too often accompanying faults of tumidity and exaggeration are generally perceptible at such a period. The biting raillery of Aristophanes has shown no mercy to the extravagance, obscurity, and bombast of Æschylus; and we cannot, therefore, be surprised to find the deeper and more delicate raillery of Shakspeare fixing upon the absurdities of Marlow's gigantic dramas. The two greatest works of this powerful writer are undoubtedly the 'Faustus' and the Jew of Malta,' the latter of which was produced before 1593. We trust we shall be excused for attempting to give some account of the first of these extraordinary works, when we mention the obligations incurred by Goethe to the Faustus' of Marlow, obligations which the patriarch of Weimar never failed to acknowledge. As in the Faust' of Goethe, Marlow's hero is a learned man of Wittenberg, who, finding the vanity of those studies which have made him the glory and envy of all Germany, makes a compact with the Evil One that he may enjoy, in exchange for his eternal salvation, a certain period of youth, beauty, and sensual indulgence. It must be confessed that, in the grandeur and vastness of the satire on human follies, in the tenderness of the pathetic scenes, in the admirable conception of the character of Margaret -that daisy, dew-besprent with tears, and blooming so sweetly at the mouth of an infernal abyss of sin and misery which yawns to

engulf it—and, above all, in the complete creation of that wondrous Mephistophiles, the German bard has shown a power not approached by the old English bard. In the pictures, however, of terror, despair, and unavailing remorse, and particularly in the terrific scene when Faustus is expecting the approach of the demon to claim performance of the dread contract,in these, and in a rich glow of classic imagery, and in the appropriate colouring of gloom and horror thrown over the whole action, we must be pardoned if we think our countryman superior. The Jew of Malta' is the portraiture of revenge and hatred embodied in the common type of the Jewish character as it appeared to the popular imagination of the sixteenth century; that is, under a form at once terrific, odious, and contemptible. Not among the least astonishing proofs of Shakspeare's divine and prescient mind is the fact that, living at a period when the Jews were still persecuted, and when popular prejudice-that indestructible monster-still believed the calumnies of the Middle Ages, and fancied that the Jews sacrificed a Christian child at the Passover, and practised the forbidden arts of magic and necromancy, Shakspeare should have been victorious over the prejudices which still enchained the mind even of the learned Marlow, and should have given us, in Shylock, the portrait, the living image, of "an Israelite indeed," not the absurd bugbear of the Elizabethan stage, with his red nose, his impossible riches, and equally impossible crimes, but a real breathing man, desperately cruel and revengeful it is true, but cruel and revengeful on what seem to him good grounds, and only so far a Jew as not the less to remain a human being like ourselves. Nothing can surpass the absurdity of Marlow's plot in this play-an absurdity hardly compensated by occasional passages of majestic though somewhat tumid declamation. Few things, for instance, can be finer than the dying speech of Barabas, the Jew

"Die life, fly soul, tongue curse thy fill, and die !"

or his comparison of himself to the ominous and obscene bird—

"The sad-presaging raven, that tolls

The sick man's passport from her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night

Doth shake contagion from her sable wings."

Marlow's life was as wild and irregular as his genius, and his death at once tragic and deplorable. It is related that in an unworthy brawl, in a place and with a person (according to some accounts a servingman) as disreputable as the occasion, he endeavoured to use his dagger on the person of his antagonist, who, seizing Marlow's wrist, gave a different direction to the poniard; the weapon entered Marlow's own head, "in such sort," to use

the words of Anthony Wood," that, notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be brought, he shortly after died of his wound."

He was buried at Deptford on the 1st of June, 1593; and many dramas have come down to us bearing the impress of his genius, and several, indeed, ascribed to his name: but such was the prevalence of his style when he wrote, and so universal at this period was the custom for several dramatists to work together or successively at the same piece, that it is very difficult to affiliate with certainty the dramas of the Elizabethan age, except those of Shakspeare.

The finest, perhaps, of these works is the Edward II.,' which contains many passages of the deepest pathos. As a proof of the high reputation enjoyed by Marlow among his contemporaries, we will quote the spirited lines of Drayton :

"Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his verses were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness he did still retain

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

In taking our leave of this great and brilliant genius, we cannot but regret that his untimely death deprived his works of the regularity which time and experience would probably have given to them; but whether we speak of him as a man or as an author, we may very well apply to him the lines pronounced in his own tragedy by the scholar over the mangled limbs of Faustus :

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight;

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,

That sometimes grew within this learned man."

There is a great deal of melancholy truth in that profound verse of the modern poet,

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men :"

and this verity will especially apply to that class of which we would desire the most minute details-the Poets. Of Homer we know so little that his very existence and personality have been brought in question; respecting Virgil we possess only a few vague and cold notices; of the private life, and, above all, the intellectual life, of Milton we possess no information but what we can glean from his writings; and of a greater yet than these Shakspeare-all the details which we possess may be condensed into a few lines, and are principally derived from the most frigid and unattractive of all sources, legal documents, the poet's will holding among these the most forward place.

William Shakspeare or Shakespeare was born, as everybody knows, in the little town of Stratford, on the Avon, in Warwick

shire, in the month of April, 1564. He was baptized on the 26th, which has originated the poetical, and certainly not very improbable tradition, that the greatest of Englishmen was born on the 23d of April, the anniversary of St. George, the tutelary saint of his country. His father was a dealer in wool (not a butcher, as was long ignorantly supposed), and had at one time been in flourishing circumstances, for he had occupied the office of high-bailiff, or chief municipal dignitary, in his native town, but he appears, notwithstanding his having married an heiress possessed of some little fortune, to have gradually sunk into great distress, and ultimately to have received charity from the corporation of which he had once been a prominent member. "Genius," as Washington Irving prettily says, "delights to nestle its offspring in strange places ;" and it is a proud distinction of England that its literature should number among its brightest names so large a proportion of men born in the humblest ranks of society. It is beneath low roofs, and few are humbler than that venerable one at Stratford, that the cradles of our greatest men were rocked; it is by poor firesides that their genius budded and expanded; and this is the reason why our literature, more than that of any other country, echoes the universal sentiments of the human heart, and speaks a language intelligible to every country and every age.

Of Shakspeare's childhood and education nothing is accurately known; perhaps the poverty of his father, by preventing him giving his son more than very limited and rustic instruction, enabled the boy's intellect to develop itself naturally and gradually, unstiffened and uncrippled by the too early discipline of the schoolmaster-that discipline which, like the swathings and swaddling-bands of the injudicious nurse, so often cripples and deforms what it is intended to render strong and beautiful. early years were probably passed amid the smiling scenery surrounding Stratford, marking, with prophetic eye, every tint of cloud and stream, every feature of external beauty, and laying up a store of observations on the passions, the sentiments, and the oddities of human character,

"While he was yet a boy,

Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency

Of natural objects then led on to feel

For passions that were not his own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)

On man, the heart of man, and human life."

His

There can be little doubt of Shakspeare having at some early period of his life been employed as clerk to some country attor ney; for he shows in all his works a technical acquaintance with the phraseology of the English law-an acquaintance, indeed, which could only have been acquired by actual practice: this

circumstance is also further proved by some of the few passages in the writings of his contemporaries in which mention is made of the great dramatist. His life at Stratford, according to the vague and imperfect traditions subsisting after his death in his native place, was idle, and perhaps even riotous: careful investigation has shown the impossibility of the events assigned by the well-known anecdote of the deer-stealing in Sir Thomas Lucy's park at Charlecote, as the immediate cause of his quitting Stratford and first adventuring in the career of London life. However reluctant we may be, in our eagerness to know the details of such a life, we must resign this picturesque story of the youthful Shakspeare's woodland misdemeanour, and seek for some other cause of his leaving Warwickshire. This is to be found in the register of the poet's marriage with Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a small farmer residing at Shottery, a village about a mile from Stratford. On the 28th of November, 1582, Shakspeare obtained at Worcester a license of marriage, permitting the ceremony to take place with once asking the banns, a circumstance which shows that this important act of life was accompanied with great hurry and precipitation, the more obviously so as Shakspeare was at this time a minor, and consequently unable to enter legally into any contract for himself. In this document, therefore, we find the names of two persons as sureties for the bridegroom, who was, it must be observed, seven years younger than his wife. All this precipitation, however, is explained by the register of baptisms in the church at Stratford, by which it appears that the poet's daughter Susanna was christened on the 26th of May, 1583, or only six months after the marriage. In a year and a half two other children, twins, were born to the poet, who had no offspring afterwards. Finding himself thus, at the early age of nineteen, a husband and a father, and probably perceiving that the obscurity of a retired village was no sphere for his intellectual powers, our poet about this time betook himself to London, there to commence his brief career of glory. Educated so imperfectly as he must have been, it is only to solitary and intense, though perhaps desultory study, that he could have owed that extensive acquaintance with books which he undoubtedly possessed; and it is therefore fair to conclude that he had been a diligent reader before he left his native place. In the employment of classical images, for example, Shakspeare shows no inferiority to any of that great number of dramatists at this period who were men of academical education; many of them indeed men of distinguished learning. His writings abound in passages indicating a very extensive and accurate acquaintance with classical imagery, and at the same time his splendid imagination has imparted to such allusions a vivacity, a brilliancy, and a glory not to be found in