There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind; and the hard, bald caustic peculiarity of his genius, which is unpleasingly felt in reading any one of his plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as we plod doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works. Like the incantations of his own witches, it "casts a thick scurf over life." It is most powerfully felt in his tragedy of "The Changeling," at once the most oppressive and impressive effort of his genius. The character of De Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of iniquity, such as we think is hardly paralleled in the whole range of the Elizabethan drama. The passions of this brute imp are not human. They are such as might be conceived of as springing from the union of animal with fiendish impulses, in a nature which knew no law outside of its own lust, and was as incapable of a scruple as of a sympathy. But of all the dramatists of the time, the most disagreeable in disposition, though by no means the least powerful in mind, was John Marston. The time of his birth is not known; his name is entangled in contemporary records with that of another John Marston; and we may be sure that his mischief-loving spirit would have been delighted could he have anticipated that the antiquaries, a century after his death, would be driven to despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the other. It is more than probable, however, that he was the John Marston who was of a respectable family in Shropshire; who took his bachelor's degree at Oxford in 1592; and who was afterwards married to a daughter of the chaplain of James the First. Whatever may have been Marston's antecedents, they were such as to gratify his tastes as a cynical observer of the crimes and follies of men,--an observer whose hatred of evil sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer could not be thus dishonored without being brought prominently into notice, and old Henslowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his libellous ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn from Henslowe's diary, under date of September 28, 1599, that he had lent to William Borne "to lend