--------England’s Helicon, a collection of songs.

--------The Psalms of David turned into English.

  The true picture of love.

  Poore painters oft with silly poets joyne,
  To fill the world with vain and strange conceits,
  One brings the stuff, the other stamps the coyne
  Which breeds nought else but glosses of deceits. 
  Thus painters Cupid paint, thus poets doe
  A naked god, blind, young, with arrows two.

Is he a god, that ever flyes the light?  Or naked he, disguis’d in all untruth?  If he be blind, how hitteth he so right?  How is he young, that tamed old Phoebus youth?  But arrowes two, and tipt with gold or lead, Some hurt, accuse a third with horney head.

No nothing so; an old, false knave he is, By Argus got on Io, then a cow:  What time for her, Juno her Jove did miss, And charge of her to Argus did allow.  Mercury killed his false sire for this act, His damme a beast was pardoned, beastly fact.

  With father’s death, and mother’s guilty shame,
  With Jove’s disdain at such a rival’s feed: 
  The wretch compel’d, a runegate became,
  And learn’d what ill, a miser-state did breed,
  To lye, to steal, to prie, and to accuse,
  Nought in himself, each other to abuse.

[Footnote 1:  Athen, Oxon, folio, p. 226.]

[Footnote 2:  Wood, p. 227.]

[Footnote 3:  Earl of Leicester.]

[Footnote 4:  Lord Brook’s life.]

[Footnote 5:  For a great many months after his death, it was reckoned indecent in any gentleman to appear splendidly dress’d; the public mourned him, not with exterior formality, but with the genuine sorrow of the heart.  Of all our poets he seems to be the most courtly, the bravest, the most active, and in the moral sense, the best.]

[Footnote 6:  Camden Brit. in Kent.]

* * * * *

CHISTOPHER MARLOE

Was bred a student in Cambridge, but there is no account extant of his family.  He soon quitted the University, and became a player on the same stage with the incomparable Shakespear.  He was accounted, says Langbaine, a very fine poet in his time, even by Ben Johnson himself, and Heywood his fellow-actor stiles him the best of poets.  In a copy of verses called the Censure of the Poets, he was thus characterized.

  Next Marloe bathed in Thespian springs,
  Had in him those brave sublunary things,
  That your first poets had; his raptures were
  All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
  For that fine madness still he did retain,
  Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.