THE DOVER ROAD 



227 



killed here in a tavern brawl. The death of Christopher 

 Marlowe at the age of thirty makes most of us wonder 

 with Mr. Matthew Arnold at the prodigal way in which 

 nature plays with the lives of the most gifted of her sons. 

 As the author of Doctor Faustus however had permitted 

 himself the licence of certain criticism quite uncalled for 

 and extremely distasteful to the clergy, our view of his 

 premature cutting off was not shared by his contem- 

 poraries. Beard, on the contrary, in his Theatre of God's 





Hall Place, Bexley. 



Judgments, thus urbanely comments on Marlowe's death 

 from his own dagger. " But see what a hooke the Lord 

 put in the Nostrils of this barking dogge ; " an effort in 

 criticism which makes us hope that there are such things 

 as literary amenities among us after all. 



The poet's birth at Canterbury ; his education there 

 at the King's School, gives him to the Dover Road as 

 perhaps its brightest ornament. When we are tired, it 

 maybe, of erecting tablets to third-class authors (English 

 and others), adorned with inscriptions which for unintelli- 



