"1634, June 26. Mr. John Marston, Minister, sometimes of the Middle Temple, who died in Aldermanbury parish: buried below the Communion Table on the Middle Temple side." The will was proved on 9th July 1634 in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury by his widow, who was buried by his side on 4th July 1657. She had desired in her will,[6] dated 12th June 1657, that she should be buried "by the body of my dear husband dec^d;" and she bequeathed her "dear husband's picture" to Master Henry Wally of Stationers' Hall. Neither in Marston's will nor in his widow's is there mention of children. Marston's earliest publication was _The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image_:[7] _And Certain Satires_, which was entered in the Stationers' Registers on 27th May 1598, and issued in the same year. Another series of satires, _The Scourge of Villainy_, was published later in 1598; it had been entered in the Stationers' Registers on 8th September. A second edition of the _Scourge_, containing an additional satire (the tenth), appeared in 1599. _Pygmalion_ is written in the same metre as _Venus and Adonis_ (from which poem Marston drew his inspiration)--a metre which Lodge had handled with considerable success. A poet who would approach the subject of Pygmalion and his image ought to be gifted with tact and delicacy. In our own day Mr. Morris (in _The Earthly Paradise_) has told the old Greek story in choice and fluent narrative verse; no poet could have treated it more gracefully. Tact and delicacy were precisely the qualities in which Marston was deficient; but the versification is tolerably smooth, and the licentiousness does not call for any special reprehension. In the _Scourge of Villainy_ (sat. vi.) Marston pretends that _Pygmalion_ was written to bring contempt on the class of poems to which it belongs:-- "Hence, thou misjudging censor! know I wrote Those idle rhymes to note the odious spot And blemish that deforms the lineaments Of modern poesy's habiliments." But it would require keener observation than most readers possess to discover in _Pygmalion_ any trace of that moral motive by which the poet claimed to have been inspired. Archbishop Whitgift did not approve of its moral tone, for in 1599 he ordered it to be committed to the flames with Sir John Davies' _Epigrams_, Cutwode's _Caltha Poetarum_, and other works of a questionable character. In Cranley's _Amanda_, 1635, it is mentioned, in company with _Hero and Leander_ and _Venus and Adonis_, as part of a courtezan's library.