This is hardly a fair specimen of Marston's powers, but it exhibits to perfection his besetting fault of straining his style a peg too high; of seeking to be impressive by the use of exaggerated and unnatural imagery. When he disencumbers himself of this fatal habit his verse is clear and massive. Neither Webster nor Chapman ever gave utterance to more dignified reflections than Marston puts into the mouth of the discrowned Andrugio in the noble speech beginning, "Why, man, I never was a prince till now" (vol. i., p. 64). There is nothing of bluster in that speech; there is not a word that one would wish to alter. Nor is Marston without something of that power, which Webster wielded so effectively, of touching the reader's imagination with a vague sense of dread. He felt keenly the mysteries of the natural world; the weird stillness that precedes the breaking of the dawn, and "the deep affright That pulseth in the heart of night." _Antonio and Mellida_ amply testifies that Marston possessed a strangely subtle and vivid imagination; but few are the traces of that "sanity" which Lamb declared to be an essential condition to true genius. In 1604 was published _The Malcontent_;[13] another edition, augmented by Webster, appeared in the same year. From the Induction we learn that it had been originally acted by the Children's Company at the Blackfriars; and that when the Children appropriated _The Spanish Tragedy_, in which the King's Company at the Globe had an interest, the King's Company retaliated by acting Marston's play, with Webster's additions. _The Malcontent_ has more dramatic interest than _Antonio and Mellida_; it is also more orderly and artistic. Jonson's criticism evidently had a salutary effect, for we find no such flowers of speech as "glibbery urchin," "sliftred paunch," "the fist of strenuous vengeance is clutch'd," &c. Marston has been at pains to give a more civil aspect to his "aspera Thalia." Moreover, the moralising is less tedious, and the satire more pungent than in the earlier plays. There is less of declamation and more of action. The atmosphere is not so stifling, and one can breathe with something of freedom. There are no ghosts to shout "Vindicta!" and no boys to be butchered at midnight in damp cloisters; nobody has his tongue cut out prior to being hacked to pieces. Marston has on this occasion contrived to write an impressive play without deeming it necessary to make the stage steam like a shambles. As before, the scene is laid in Italy; and again we have a vicious usurper, and a virtuous deposed duke; but the characters are more human than in the earlier plays. Mendoza, the upstart tyrant, is indeed a deeply debased villain, but he is not deformed, like Piero, beyond all recognition. Altofronto, the banished duke, who disguises himself in the character of a malcontent and settles at the usurper's court, is a more possible personage than Andrugio.