all the virulent slaver of his grovelling insolence, is aimed at the stage for which Marston was employed in writing—weighs nothing in the scales of imbecility against the consideration that Marston's or Jonson's manner is here and there more or less closely imitated; that we catch now and then some such echo of his accent, some such savor of his style, as may be discovered or imagined in the very few scattered lines which show any glimmer of capacity for composition or versification. The eternal theme of envy, invented by Jonson and worked to death by its inventor, was taken up again by Marston and treated with a vigorous acerbity not always unworthy of comparison with Jonson's; the same conception inspired with something of eloquence the malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who has left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rubbish, a line or two like these which he has put into the mouth of his patron saint or guardian goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy.
Turn, turn, thou lackey to the wingèd time!
I envy thee in that thou art so slow,
And I so swift to mischief.
But the entire affair is obviously an effusion and an example of the same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance in other contemporary protests of the universities
