LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 315 



far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely 

 above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of 

 Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of 

 thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, un- 

 tempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a 

 strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declama- 

 tion, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of 

 character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, 

 a great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only one of that 

 age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of 

 sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and 

 Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a 

 poet as any that England has produced ; but his mind 

 had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid 

 enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our 

 imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. 

 Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, 

 whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen 

 of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all 

 thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, 

 like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty 

 common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great 

 critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready eye 

 for the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was 

 as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any 

 man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tragedy with 

 truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakespeare 

 had that true sense of humor which, like the universal 

 solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all 

 the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any 

 question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is 

 silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity. 

 Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge ; but, in our 

 opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree 

 with Shakespeare, except Cervantes ; no man has since 



