he says: the verses are in the stanza of "Venus and Adonis". With a cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory statue of a woman, invokes the shade of Ovid--who lived much after his time. At his prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases to sing lasciviously. Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. Toots to the Chicken, "the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure". The first attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. Toots, letters to himself. Parasites and boasting soldadoes are also satirized. A quarrel with Hall who styled himself "the first English satirist," arose; the authors of "The Return from Parnassus" (1601) spoke of Marston with coarse but effective contempt. In 1599 this "new poet" sold a play to Henslowe. His "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will," and "The Malcontent" (a misanthrope, as in Molière and Wycherley), do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts for the old drama. In the dedication to "The Malcontent" Marston made up his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had assailed in "Satiromastix" in reply to Ben's "Poetaster" (1601), not before Ben, according to his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 Marston joined Chapman and Ben in composing "Eastward Ho". The remarks on the Scots, for which the authors were imprisoned, are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to make for the purpose of teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is a very good-humoured study of life in London--rather in Hogarth's manner,--with the honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle apprentice; his ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a castle in the air; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious apprentice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and local colour that was useful to Scott in "The Fortunes of Nigel". Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy; he wearied of play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and careless of his own fame. Dekker. Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a playwright and bookseller's hack, concerning whose life little is known except that he was one of Henslowe's "hands" in 1597; was redeemed by Henslowe from prison in the Poultry in 1598; and was still producing pamphlets in 1637. A Londoner by birth, he knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The Honest Whore" proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose was "The Gull's Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the taverns; the thieves; the _bona robas_, usurers, fops, gamblers, all the world which is best known to the modern reader in "The Fortunes of Nigel".