are found verbatim in Barksteed's poem _Myrrha_. We know little of Barksteed, but it is probable that he is to be identified with the William Barksted, or Backsted, who was one of Prince Henry's players in August 1611 (Collier's _Memoirs of Edward Alleyn_, p. 98), and belonged to the company of the Prince Palatine's players in March 1615-6 (_ibid._, p. 126). He is the author of two poems,[25] which display some graceful fancy (though the subject of the first is ill-chosen),--_Myrrha the Mother of Adonis_, 1607, and _Hiren and the Fair Greek_, 1611. As we read _The Insatiate Countess_ we cannot fail to notice passages containing a richness of fancy, and a musical fluency of expression, to which Marston's undoubted plays afford no parallel. The italicised lines are certainly not in Marston's vein:-- "Like to the lion when he hears the sound _Of Dian's bowstring in some shady wood_, I should have couched my lowly limb on earth _And held my silence a proud sacrifice_." "Others, compared to her, show like faint stars _To the full moon of wonder in her face_." Again: the play contains an unusually large number of imitations of Shakespearean passages. In fact I know no play of this early date in which Shakespeare is so persistently imitated or plagiarised. Again and again we find images and expressions borrowed more or less closely from _Hamlet_. Shakespeare's historical plays, too, were laid under contribution. In the very first scene we have these lines:-- "Slave, I will fight with thee at any odds; Or name an instrument fit for destruction, That e'er was made to make away a man, I'll meet thee on the ridges of the Alps, Or some inhospitable wilderness." A very cool piece of plagiarism from _Richard II_. (i. 1):-- "Which to maintain I would allow him odds And meet him, were I tied to run a-foot Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps Or any other ground inhabitable." In the lines, "The ghosts of misers that imprison'd gold Within _the harmless bowels of the earth_," the italicised words were unquestionably suggested by a passage of Hotspur's famous speech in _Henry IV._, i. 2,-- "That villainous salt-petre should be digg'd Out of _the bowels of the harmless earth_." When Don Sago in iv. 3 exclaims-- "A hundred times in life a coward dies," we are immediately reminded of Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_ (ii. 2), "Cowards die many times before their death;" and Sago's lament in v. 1, "Although ... the waves of all the Northern sea Should flow for ever through these guilty hands, Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be,"