of Sestos, Hero, sacrificing turtles' blood to Venus on a silver altar, was first seen by Leander in the temple. He ventured speech with her, reasoned of love to willing ears, and stirred within her a confusion of first love with maidenly

reserve

"So having paused a while at last she said,

'Who taught thee rhetoric to deceive a maid?
Ay me, such words as these should I abhor,
And yet I like them for the orator.'
With that Leander stooped to have embraced her,
But from his spreading arms away she cast her,
And thus bespake him, 'Gentle youth, forbear
To touch the sacred garments which I wear.
Upon a rock, and underneath a hill,

Far from the town (where all is whist and still,
Save that the sea, playing on yellow sand,
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land,
Whose sound allures the golden Morpheus
In silence of the night to visit us),

My turret stands; and there, God knows, I play
With Venus' swans and sparrows all the day.

A dwarfish beldam bears me company,

That hops about the chamber where I lie,

And spends the night, that might be better spent,

In vain discourse and apish merriment:

Come thither.' As she spake this, her tongue tripped,

For unawares 'Come thither' from her slipped;

And suddenly her former colour changed

And here and there her eyes through anger ranged;
And, like a planet moving several ways

At one self instant, she, poor soul, assays,
Loving, not to love at all, and every part

Strove to resist the motions of her heart;
And hands so pure, so innocent, nay such

As might have made Heaven stoop to have a touch,
Did she uphold to Venus."

In the last six or seven lines of that passage we see very distinctly an approach towards the style of which Donne, in the reign of James I., was the favourite exemplar.

A little earlier in the poem, when it describes Leander first enamoured suddenly, there comes the line quoted by Shakespeare in "As You Like It," written between 1598 and

1600

"Dead shepherd, now I know thy saw of might,
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?"

This is its context

"It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over ruled by fate,

When two are stript, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win:
And one especially do we affect

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect :
The reason no man knows, let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?"

A translation by Christopher Marlowe of the first book of Lucan into blank verse was printed in the year

First Book of Lucan.

1600, uniform with that year's edition of "Hero

and Leander," and meant to be sold with it.

"The Passionate

his Love."

Shakespeare quoted Marlowe, also, in the beginning of the Third Act of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," when Sir Hugh Evans, full of cholers and trembling of mind and melancholies, awaits a duel, Shepherd to and quavers, with confusion of memory, lines from "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." This piece was first printed, in 1599, as "The Passionate Pilgrim," without the fourth and sixth stanzas, and then printed complete, with Marlowe's name attached, in "England's Helicon":

"Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

"And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

"And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cup of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

"A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

"A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs :
An if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

"The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning :
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love." *

The Death of Marlowe.

In the burial register of the parish church of St. Nicholas, Deptford, is this entry: "Christopher Marlow, slain by ffrancis Archer, the 1 of June 1593." Several differing accounts bring theologic hate into imagined details of the slaying of young Marlowe. There seems to be no room for doubt that Marlowe yielded to the temptations of tavern life, when taverns were the common meeting-places of the wits; and that he was accused of blasphemy because he wrote or spoke-Sir William Vaughan said he had written a book-against the doctrine of the Trinity. This was the account given of Marlowe's

* Sharing the spell upon the mind that is in every familiar word of this old song, I feel like a dunce when suggesting that there may be two original misprints in it, of "cup" for "cap," and of "fair-lined" for "fur-lined."

death by Sir William Vaughan in "The Golden Grove, moralized in three Bookes," and first published in 1600

"Not inferiour to these was one Christopher Marlow, by profession a play-maker, who, as is reported, about 14 yeres ago wrote a booke against the Trinitie. But see the effects of God's justice! It so happened that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram that had inuited him thither to a feast and was then playing at tables, hee quickly perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort that his braynes comming out at the dagger's point, hee shortly after dyed. Thus did God, the true executioner of diuine iustice, worke the end of impious atheists."

This way of taking God's name in vain used to be very common. The only particular in which we have means of testing the accuracy of Sir William Vaughan's record is the name of the person who killed Marlowe, and he gives it wrong. To one who knew the poet better, he was "kynde Kit Marloe." And I must think that Shakespeare knew Kit Marlowe as a friend, looking only to the nature of the men, the fact that they were brought often together by their duties at the theatre, and the indications of joint work upon. "King Henry VI."

Another poet-friend of Shakespeare's-Michael Drayton -who had fire in his own verse and sweetness too, thus defined Marlowe's rare genius when a generation had passed since his death:

"Next Marlowe, bathéd in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness did he still retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

SHAKESPEARE'S

CHAPTER V.

KING RICHARD III." AND "KING JOHN."

Shake

speare's
King
Richard
III."

"KING RICHARD III." completes the Civil War series of the Three Parts of "King Henry VI.," and is probably the earliest historical play of which Shakespeare alone was the author. There was an older play of which Shakespeare made no use, entitled "The True Tragedy of Richard the Third: wherein is shown the death of Edward the Fourth, with the smothering of the two young Princes in the Tower with a lamentable end of Shore's wife, an example for all wicked women. And lastly, the conjunction and joining of the two noble houses, Lancaster and York. As it was played by the Queen's Majesty's Players." This old piece was first printed in 1594, and was then evidently of older date. It has been suggested that, as it includes references to contemporary events, and does not refer to the Spanish Armada, the play must have been written before 1588. Its form certainly indicates an undeveloped state of the drama, and it has interest of its own as one of the earliest historical plays in our printed literature. There was also a Latin play on Richard III." by Dr. Legge, acted at Cambridge before 1583, which has no likeness to Shakespeare's.

Of Shakespeare's "Richard III." there are four quartos, each giving it "as it hath been lately acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants." The title in each is the same: "The Tragedy of King Richard the