decidedly smacks of _Macbeth_. Occasionally, it is true, Marston does not scruple to borrow from Shakespeare, but in none of his plays are the Shakespearean echoes so clear and frequent as in _The Insatiate Countess_. The text, as I have said, is extremely corrupt, and the confusion among the _dramatis personæ_ is perplexing to the last degree (see note, vol. iii. p. 154). I suspect that Marston, on entering the church, left this tragedy in a fragmentary state, and that it was completed by the actor Barksteed. The whole interest centres in the beautiful and sinful Isabella, whose wayward glances, as she moves in splendour, fascinate all beholders; who is indeed a "glorious devil" without shame or pity, boundless and insatiable as the sea in the enormity of her caprices. In addition to his plays, his poem of _Pygmalion_, and his satires, Marston wrote a Latin pageant on the occasion of the visit paid by the King of Denmark to James I. in 1606, and an entertainment, which is not without elegance, in honour of a visit paid by the Dowager Countess of Derby to her son-in-law and daughter, Lord and Lady Huntingdon, at Ashby. I strongly doubt whether _The Mountebank's Masque_, performed at Court in February 1616-17 (when Marston was attending to his clerical duties in Hampshire), has been correctly assigned to Marston. There are two anonymous plays[26] in which Marston's hand is plainly discernible,--_Histriomastix_, published in 1610, and _Jack Drum's Entertainment_, published in 1616. It has been mentioned (see note, p. xxxii.) that Jonson in _Every Man out of his Humour_ puts into Clove's mouth, with the object of ridiculing Marston, words and expressions found in _Histriomastix_ (coupling them with flowers of speech culled from _The Scourge of Villainy_), and even mentions the play by name--"as you may read in Plato's _Histriomastix_." Only in a few scenes of _Histriomastix_ can Marston's hand be detected. It is a poor semi-allegorical play, a clumsy piece of patchwork. Marston's additions must have been made before Christmas 1599 (when _Every Man out of his Humour_ was produced), on the occasion of some revival. The following lines, which occur early in the second act, seem to refer to Ben Jonson:-- "How, you translating scholar? You can make A stabbing satire or an epigram, And think you carry just Rhamnusia's whip To lash the patient! go, get you clothes: Our free-born blood such apprehension loathes."