Page:Hero and Leander - Marlowe and Chapman (1821).pdf/24

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PREFACE.

enriched, and gorgeously invested with rare ornaments, and resplendent habiliments, the English tongue." Carew couples his name with that of Shakspeare in the following passage of his "Excellencies of the English tongue:" "Would you read Catullus, take Shakspeare's and Marlow's fragments:" and Nashe, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaking of Hero and Leander, says, "of whom divine Musæus sung, and a diviner muse than he, Kit Marlow." George Peele, in his "Honour of the Garter," thus mentions him:

————————"Unhappy in thy end,
Marlow, the Muses' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below."

Henry Petowe published what he calls a second part of the Hero and Leander, in 1598, and in the following passages exceeds all his eulogists in panegyric, though his verses are homely.

"Marlow admir'd, whose honey-flowing vein
No English writer can as yet attain.
Whose name, in Fame's immortal treasury,
Truth shall record to endless memory.