his plays, that the reader who should make his first acquaintance with this poet through the deceptive means of so flattering an introduction would be justified in supposing that he had fallen in with a tragic dramatist of the very highest order—­with a new candidate for a station in the very foremost rank of English poets.  And if the evil star which seems generally to have presided over the literary fortunes of John Marston should misguide the student, on first opening a volume of his works, into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness as too frequently deforms the face of his uneven and irregular demesne, the inevitable sense of disappointment and repulsion which must immediately ensue will too probably discourage a casual explorer from any renewal of his research.

Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his elaborate attack on Marston, selected for ridicule as characteristically grotesque instances of affected and infelicitous innovation—­but which nevertheless have taken root in the language, and practically justified their adoption—­describe as happily as any that could be chosen to describe the better and the worse quality of his early tragic and satiric style.  These words are “strenuous” and “clumsy.”  It is perpetually, indefatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too often vehemently, emphatically, and laboriously clumsy.  But at its best, when the clumsy and ponderous incompetence of expression which disfigures it is supplanted by a strenuous felicity of ardent and triumphant aspiration, it has notes and touches in the compass of its course not unworthy of Webster or Tourneur or even Shakespeare himself.  Its occasionally exquisite delicacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess of coarseness, awkwardness, or violent and elaborate extravagance.  No sooner has he said anything especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime, than the evil genius must needs take his turn, exact as it were the forfeit of his bond, impel the poet into some sheer perversity, deface the flow and form of the verse with some preposterous crudity or flatulence of phrase which would discredit the most incapable or the most fantastic novice.  And the worst of it all is that he limps or stumbles with either foot alternately.  At one moment he exaggerates the license of artificial rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most high-flown and hyperbolical poetic diction; at the next, he falls flat upon the naked level of insignificant or offensive realism.

These are no slight charges; and it is impossible for any just or sober judgment to acquit John Marston of the impeachment conveyed in them.  The answer to it is practical and simple:  it is that his merits are great enough to outweigh and overshadow them all.  Even if his claim to remembrance were merely dependent on the value of single passages, this would suffice to secure him his place of honor in the train of Shakespeare.  If his most ambitious efforts at portraiture of character are often faulty at once