When any of us can make as spirited a translation as that, I think we can stand a scolding from the teachers for not being literal. George Chapman lived a very long life, and did other things worthily; wrote a mass of dramas[101]--but not of the very best; they belong to the class of plays those people talk of who want to talk of things nobody has read. I think better and richer things are before us. _Marlowe._ Did it ever happen to you to read upon a summer’s day that delightful old book--of a half century later--called _The Complete Angler_; and do you remember how, on a certain evening when the quiet Angler had beguiled himself with loitering under beech-trees and watching the lambs and listening to the birds, he did encounter, in an adjoining field, a handsome milkmaid, who lifted up her voice--which was like a nightingale’s--to an old-fashioned song, beginning?-- “Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, or hills, or field Or woods, or steepy mountains yield-- And I will make thee beds of roses And then a thousand fragrant posies A cap of flowers and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.” Well, that song of the milkmaid, with its setting of verdant meads and silver streams and honeysuckle hedges keeps singing itself in a great many ears to-day: And it was written by Christopher Marlowe,[102] one of the most harum-scarum young dare-devils of Elizabethan times. He was born in the same year with Shakespeare--down in Canterbury, or near by (whither we saw St. Augustine carrying Christian crosses)--was son of a shoemaker who lived thereabout, yet came somehow to be a Cambridge man, drifted thereafter to London--full of wit and words of wantonness; developing early; known for a tragedy that caught the ear of the town six years before Shakespeare had published the “Venus and Adonis.” He was an actor, too, as so many of the dramatic wits of that day were--maybe upon the same boards where Shakespeare was then certainly a mender, if not a maker of parts. Did they hobnob together? Did they compare plots? If we only knew: but we do not.