his statements. It is noteworthy that Marlowe's heroes are usually heathens or infidels, and he takes every opportunity of insinuating a sceptical opinion. Probably his unorthodox views had much to do with the accusation of "vices sent from hell" in an anonymous play written shortly after his death. It is certain he had friends among the finest-natured men of his time. Walsingham was his patron; there seems a touch of tenderness in Shakespeare's apostrophe of the "dead shepherd " in As you Like It; Nash, who had sometimes been a jealous rival, wrote an elegy" on Marlowe's untimely death which has not survived; an anonymous writer in 1600 speaks lovingly of "kynde Kit Marloe;' Edward Blunt, Marlowe's friend and publisher, writes, in words that have a genuine ring, of " the impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an after-life in our memory;" Drayton's wellinspired lines are familiar :

"Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That our first poets had his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

Chapman also wrote concerning

"his free soul, whose living subject stood

Up to the chin in the Pierian flood."

There is no alloy of blame in the words of these

1 This very interesting document is given in full in the Appendix. Mr. Bullen (following the Rev. A. Dyce) made some important omissions.

men, Drayton and Chapman, and they were among the gravest as well as the best-loved of their time. One lingers over the faintest traces of this personality which must have been so fascinating, for we have no further trustworthy indications of the manner of man that he was in the eyes of those who knew him.

There is, at last, one precious fragment which we cannot afford to pass by, for it bears Marlowe's intensely personal impress. Without this fragment of Hero and Leander1 we should not have known the full sweetness and range of his genius. It is the brightest flower of the English Renaissance, apart from that moral energy of the Reformation of which Chapman, together with something less than usual of his elaborate obscurity, afterwards gave it some faint tincture. It is a free and fresh and eager song,

drunk with gladness,”—like Hero who "stayed not for her robes," but straight arose to open the door to her lover-full of ideal beauty that finds its expression in the form and colour of things, above all in the bodies of men and women; for the passion of love, apart from the passion of beauty, Marlowe failed to grasp. No Elizabethan had so keen a sense of physical loveliness as these lines. reveal:

"His body was as straight as Circe's wand;

Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand.

Even as delicious meat is to the taste,

So was his neck in touching, and surpassed

1 Marlowe's poems and translations have not received further notice here because they will, I hope, be included in a supplementary volume of the series.

The white of Pelops' shoulder: I could tell ye,

How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;

And whose immortal fingers did imprint

That heavenly path with many a curious dint

That runs along his back."

Shakespeare could not have been younger than Marlowe when he wrote his Venus and Adonis, which has ever since been coupled with Marlowe's poem.1 Venus and Adonis is oppressive with its unexpanded power; its workmanship is perhaps more searching and thorough, though so much less felicitous than that of Hero and Leander; but we turn away with delight from its massive monotonous energy, its close and sensual atmosphere, to the free and open air, the colour and light, the swift and various music of Marlowe's poem. Shelley has scarcely surpassed the sweet gravity which the verse of" our elder Shelley" here reaches :

"It lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is over-ruled by fate.

When two are stripped, long e'er the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win ;

And one especially do we affect

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect :

The reason no man knows, let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight :

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?"

The peculiar beauty of these lines seems to have

1 They had a wide popular reputation, resting on their supposed licentiousness, as, at a later day, Mademoiselle de Maupin. "I have conveyed away all her wanton pamphlets," says Harebrain in Middleton's A Mad World, my Masters, "as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, O two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife."

dwelt in Shakespeare's memory. It is little surprising that men were not easily tired of Hero and Leander. Taylor the water-poet tells us how his fellow scullers used to sing it as they plied their occupation on the Thames. It was these "sweetaccording rimes" of Marlowe's, which, as his enthusiastic young admirer, Petowe, wrote,

66 moved such delight,

That men would shun their sleep in still dark night
To meditate upon his golden lines."

In the spring of 1593 the plague raged in London. The actors went into the provinces; many authors sought refuge in the country. In May we know that Marlowe was at the little village of Deptford, not many miles from London. There was turbulent blood there, and wine; there were courtesans and daggers. Here Marlowe was slain, killed by a serving-man, a rival in a quarrel over bought kisses "a bawdy serving-man." They buried him in an unknown spot, beneath the grey towers of St. Nicholas, and they wrote in the parish-book: "Christopher Marlow, slain by ffrancis Archer, the I of June 1593."

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

1 So the brief account of Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598). There are other more suspected narratives, varying considerably from each other, and with a marked bias in favour of moral edification.