“Behold yon tower: there stands mine armoury, In which are corselets forged of beaten gold To arm ten hundred thousand fighting men, Whose glittering squadrons when the sun beholds, They seem like to ten hundred thousand Joves, When Jove on the proud back of thunder rides, Trapped all in lightning-flames. There can I show thee The ball of gold that set all Troy on fire; There shalt thou see the scarf of Cupid’s mother, Snatcht from the soft moist ivory of her arm To wrap about Adonis’ wounded thigh; There shalt thou see a wheel of Titan’s car Which dropt from Heaven when Phaethon fired the world. I’ll give thee (if thou wilt) two silver doves Composed by magic to divide the air, Who, as they flie, shall clap their silver wings And give strange music to the elements. I’ll give thee else the fan of Proserpine, Which, in reward for a sweet Thracian song, The blackbrow’d Empress threw to Orpheus, Being come to fetch Eurydice from hell.” This is, here and there, tremblingly near bombast, but its exuberance is cheery, and the quaintness of Proserpine’s fan shows how real she was to the poet. Hers was a generous gift, considering the climate in which Dekker evidently supposed her to dwell, and speaks well for the song that could make her forget it. There is crudeness, as if the wine had been drawn before the ferment was over, but the arm of Venus is from the life, and that one verse gleams and glows among the rest like the thing it describes. The whole passage is a good example of fancy, whimsical, irresponsible. But there is more imagination and power to move the imagination in Shakespeare’s “sunken wreck and sunless treasures” than all his contemporaries together, not even excepting Marlowe, could have mustered. We lump all these poets together as dramatists because they wrote for the theatre, and yet how little they were truly dramatic seems proved by the fact that none, or next to none, of their plays have held the stage. Not one of their characters, that I can remember, has become one of the familiar figures that make up the habitual society of any cultivated memory even of the same race and tongue. Marlowe, great as he was, makes no exception. To some of them we cannot deny genius, but creative genius we must deny to all of them, and dramatic genius as well.