It wakened Cæsar from his Roman grave
To hear war beautified by her discourse.
Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue;
Beauty a slander, but in her fair face;
There is no summer but in her cheerful looks,
Nor frosty winter but in her disdain.
I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her,
For she is all the treasure of our land;
But call them cowards that they ran away,
Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.
But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning—
Now, Lodowick, invocate[1] some golden Muse
To bring thee hither an enchanted pen;
- ↑ A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.
while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse—common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of Gorboduc and Locrine—which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe's imperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master's untimely death.
Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay,
Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide:
If not—turn from me, and I'll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the power to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.
But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of King Edward III.
