This at least may be said of him without risk of violating the rule of _ne quid nímis_, that he is one of the most masculine and fecundating natures in the long line of British poets. Perhaps his energy was even in excess. There is in him an Oriental lavishness. He will impoverish a province for a simile, and pour the revenues of a kingdom into the lap of a description. In that delightful story in the book of Esdras, King Darius, who has just dismissed all his captains and governors of cities and satraps, after a royal feast, sends couriers galloping after them to order them all back again, because he has found a riddle under his pillow, and wishes their aid in solving it. Marlowe in like manner calls in help from every the remotest corner of earth and heaven for what seems to us as trivial an occasion. I will not say that he is bombastic, but he constantly pushes grandiosity to the verge of bombast. His contemporaries thought he passed it in his “Tamburlaine.” His imagination flames and flares, consuming what it should caress, as Jupiter did Semele. That exquisite phrase of Hamlet, “the modesty of nature,” would never have occurred to him. Yet in the midst of the hurly-burly there will fall a sudden hush, and we come upon passages calm and pellucid as mountain tarns filled to the brim with the purest distillations of heaven. And, again, there are single verses that open silently as roses, and surprise us with that seemingly accidental perfection, which there is no use in talking about because itself says all that is to be said and more. There is a passage in “Tamburlaine” which I remember reading in the first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet’s feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea:-- “If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit;-- If these had made one poem’s period, And all combined in beauty’s worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.” Marlowe made snatches at this forbidden fruit with vigorous leaps, and not without bringing away a prize now and then such as only the fewest have been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a few as instances of this:-- “Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, _With hair that gilds the water as it glides_, Shall bathe him in a spring.” Here is a couplet notable for dignity of poise describing Tamburlaine:-- “Of stature tall and straightly fashioned, Like his desire, lift upward and divine.” “For every street like to a firmament Glistered with breathing stars.”