His face, mobile dark and passionate, showed an almost alarming intensity. His brow, lofty but not massive, was surmounted by silken hair so black as to appear almost purple in the sunlight. He wore no beard, a small mustache adding to the refinement of his features, save for the fulness of his lips, which it could not hide. Taken as a whole, his face was the face of a man who had no common destiny; of a man who would drain the cup and leave no dregs, be the draught life-elixir or poison; of a man, in short, who might all but transcend his humanity by the fulness of life within him, or be suffocated and overwhelmed by the very superabundance of that life. For there are some seeming to be born with a double share of vitality, a portion far greater than was meant for man; and when this vitality, maturing, begins its re-creation, threatening all feebler forms with a new revolutionary condition, then the error is apparently discovered and the entire share of life recalled. Christopher Marlowe was one of these men, but as he leaned against the Southwark Gate, that afternoon in early life, looking up the High Street through the gathering dusk, his eyes showed little more than the cheerful glow of a wood-fire, the mere hint of an unrestrainable flame underlying their expression. Soon, however, the poet’s reverie was broken. The afternoon’s bear-baiting being over, and Southwark’s amphitheatre empty of its throngs, a number of the earliest to leave were now upon the High Street, known then as Long Southwark. Seeing them approaching him on their way to London, Marlowe turned and walked in the same direction. At the sign of “The Three Bibles” books and broadsides were for sale. It was this small, antiquated den on London Bridge that the author sought with the unconscious step of one who follows a familiar way. He had but just entered the low-studded, gloomy shop, and greeted Paul Merfin, its owner, when the scabbard of a sword clanked on the threshold, and a man of great stature, accoutred as a soldier, darkened the doorway. With no prelude of salutation, the new-comer demanded of Merfin, in a voice of anxiety, “Tell me, hast seen—?” Then for the first time he became aware of Marlowe’s presence, and, lowering his heavy tones to a whisper, finished his query in the bookseller’s ear. “Nay,” was Merfin’s answer, “I have seen nothing of him.” The soldier’s face grew yet more uneasy. “Ill fortune!” he exclaimed; “it is always so,” and he would have left the shop had not Marlowe detained him. “Stay,” said the poet, “I could not but hear your question, for your whisper, sir, being no gentler than a March wind, nips the ear whether we will or no. So you, I take it, are that giant, Hugh Rouse, who follows the Wolf. Of you twain I have heard much, and wondered if the tales from the South were true that told of so great a courage. I have seen the man, show me now the master.”