principal poem, must not be delayed farther; and, first, for Marlow's share.
There is in all the Elizabethan writers a wonderful exuberance and display of mental riches: they give full measure, heaped, and running over.—"They mingle every thing," says that choice critic Lamb, "run line into line, embarrass sentences and metaphors. The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed with the confluence of images," &c. These general remarks apply to the particular case before us. Taken as a whole, Marlow's "Hero and Leander contains much to blame, but, considered by sections, more out of all proportion to praise. The quickness of his fancy would not allow him to treat the story simply:—he was obliged to branch forth into splendid superfluities.—The human part of his plot is good, but he could not let well alone.—Thus he has scarcely finished Leander's passionately eloquent wooing, and the rich-haired Hero's unconscious assent, given with such sweet naiveté, when he launches out into an episode, brightly coloured, and ingeniously compacted it
