24 THE DOVER ROAD 



know too little of him, and no portraiture has come 

 down to show us what manner of man this was who 

 wrote divinely and lived (if we may believe the scribes) 

 sottishly, after the manner, indeed, of the fraternity 

 of his fellow-dramatists. It should seem, by some 

 contemporary accounts, that he was killed by a rival 

 in the affections of some saucy baggage ; but there 

 were not wanting those who asserted that the poet 

 was assassinated by some myrmidon of the Church, 

 whose priests he lost no opportunity of reviling. To 

 lend some colour to this, there remains a pamphlet, 

 printed in 1618, entitled — what a title ! — " The 

 Thunderbolt of God's Wrath Against Hard-hearted 

 and Stiff-necked Sinners." It says, " We read of one 

 Marlowe, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a poet and 

 a filthy play-maker ; this wretch accounted that 

 meeke servant of God, Moses, to be but a conjuror, 

 and our Sweet Saviour to be but a seducer and deceiver 

 of the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and 

 prophane poets and players, that bewitch idle cares 

 with foolish vanities, what fell upon this prophane 

 wretch ; having a quarrell against one whom he met 

 in the street in London, and would have stab'd him ; 

 but the partie perceiving his villany prevented him 

 with catching his hands, and turning his own dagger 

 into his braines ; and so blaspheming and cursing he 

 yeelded up his stinking breath. Marke this, ye 

 players that live by making fools laugh at sinne and 

 wickedness." 



VII 



Leaving " dirty Deptford," that being the contu- 

 melious conjuction by which the place has generally 

 been known, any time these last hundred years or so 

 (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its 

 well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road 

 ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine old 



