successive events or the mere display of emotions (except always in the
great scene of the deposition) rather animal than spiritual in their
expression of rage or tenderness or suffering. The exact balance of
mutual effect, the final note of scenic harmony between ideal
conception and realistic execution, is not yet struck with perfect
accuracy of touch and security of hand; but on this point also Marlowe
has here come nearer by many degrees to Shakespeare than any of his
other predecessors have ever come near to Marlowe.

Of "The Massacre at Paris" it is impossible to judge fairly from the
garbled fragment of its genuine text, which is all that has come down
to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other obligations, we owe the
discovery of a striking passage excised in the piratical edition which
gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play; and which, it
must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is
obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is
overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical
quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That
anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged
chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen
Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to
conjecture what it would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in
the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really
admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after
the death of Marlowe.

The tragedy of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," was probably completed for the
stage after that irreparable and incalculable loss to English letters by
Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure,
and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities