HOLLOW HOSPITALITY.

[From Book iii. Sat. 3.]

The courteous citizen bade me to his feast
With hollow words, and overly1 request :
'Come, will ye dine with me this holiday?'
I yielded, though he hop'd I would say nay:
For I had maiden'd it, as many use;
Loath for to grant, but loather to refuse.

'Alack, sir, I were loath—another day,—

I should but trouble you ;-pardon me, if you may.'
No pardon should I need; for, to depart

He gives me leave, and thanks too, in his heart.
Two words for money, Darbyshirian wise:
(That's one too many) is a naughty guise.
Who looks for double biddings to a feast,
May dine at home for an importune guest.
I went, then saw, and found the great expense;
The face and fashions of our citizens.

Oh, Cleopatrical! what wanteth there

For curious cost, and wondrous choice of cheer?
Beef, that erst Hercules held for finest fare;

Pork, for the fat Boeotian, or the hare
For Martial; fish for the Venetian;
Goose-liver for the licorous Roman;

Th' Athenian's goat; quail, Iolaus' cheer;
The hen for Esculape, and the Parthian deer;
Grapes for Arcesilas", figs for Pluto's mouth,

And chestnuts fair for Amarillis' tooth.

Hadst thou such cheer? wert thou ever there before?
Never, I thought so: nor come there no more.
Come there no more; for so meant all that cost:
Never hence take me for thy second host.
For whom he means to make an often guest,
One dish shall serve; and welcome make the rest.

1 Superficial.

2 Plutarch, Moralia 668 a, calls Arcesilaus piλóßoтpus.

A COXCOMB.

[From Book iii. Sat. 5.]

Late travelling along in London way
Me met, as seen by his disguised array,
A lusty courtier, whose curled head
With abron1 locks was fairly furnished.

I him saluted in our lavish wise;
He answers my untimely courtesies :

His bonnet vailed, ere ever he could think
The unruly wind blows off his periwinke.

He lights and runs and quickly hath him sped
To overtake his overrunning head.

The sportful wind, to mock the headless man,
Tosses apace his pitched Rogerian 2:

And straight it to a deeper ditch hath blown;
There must my yonker fetch his waxen crown.
I looked and laughed, whiles in his raging mind
He cursed all courtesy and unruly wind.

I looked and laughed, and much I marvelled

To see so large a causeway on his head,

And me bethought, that when it first begon

'Twas some shrewd autumn that so bared the bone.

Is't not sweet pride, when men their crowns must shade
With that which jerks the hams of every jade,

Or floor-strewed locks from off the Barber's shears?
But waxen crowns well 'gree with borrowed hairs.

A DESERTED MANSION.

[From Book v. Sat. 2.]

Beat the broad gates, a goodly hollow sound With double echoes doth again rebound; But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee, Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see; All dumb and silent, like the dead of night, Or dwelling of some sleepy Sybarite. The marble pavement hid with desert weed, With houseleek, thistle, dock, and hemlock seed: 1 Auburn. 2 A nickname for a false scalp.

But if thou chance cast up thy wondering eyes,
Thou shalt discern upon the frontispiece
ΟΥΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ 1 graven up on high,

A fragment of old Plato's poesy:

The meaning is, 'Sir Fool, ye may be gone,
Go back by leave, for way here lieth none.'
Look to the towered chimneys, which should be
The windpipes of good hospitality,

Through which it breatheth to the open air,
Betokening life, and liberal welfare;

Lo there the unthankful swallow takes her rest,
And fills the tunnel with her circled nest;
Nor half that smoke from all his chimneys goes
Which one tobacco pipe drives through his nose.
So rawbone hunger scorns the mudded walls,
And 'gins to revel it in lordly halls.

ADVICE TO MARRY BETIMES.

[From Book iv. Sat. 4.]

Wars, God forfend! nay God defend from war;
Soon are sons spent, that not soon reared are.
Gallio may pull me roses ere they fall,
Or in his net entrap the tennis ball,
Or tend his spar-hawk mantling in her mew,
Or yelping beagles' busy heels pursue,
Or watch a sinking cork upon the shore,
Or halter finches through a privy door,
Or list he spend the time in sportful game,
In daily courting of his lovely dame,
Hang on her lips, melt in her wanton eye,
Dance in her hand, joy in her jollity:
Here's little peril, and much lesser pain,

So timely Hymen do the rest restrain.

Hie wanton Gallio and wed betime,

Why should'st thou lose the pleasures of thy prime? Seest thou the rose leaves fall ungathered?

Then hie thee, wanton Gallio, to wed.

1. Let no man enter.'

JOHN MARSTON.

[MARSTON has been identified with an Oxford man of that name who was admitted B.A. in 1593, and with Maxton or Mastone, the new poet' mentioned in Henslowe's Diary in 1599. But nothing is known of his private life. He published The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires in 1598, and The Scourge of Villany, Three Books of Satires, in the same year. He was conjoined with Chapman and Jonson in the composition of the play called Eastward Ho! which had unpleasant consequences for its authors, and he wrote several plays by himself, the dates of which range from 1602 to 1613.]

If we were asked whether Marston should be classed as a satirist or as a dramatist, it would be difficult to give a satisfactory answer. His plays are full of satiric power, and his satires are not without evidences of the dramatist's way of looking at life. The personages of his dramas, though boldly and fully pourtrayed, are set up as types of base or noble humanity, to be vehemently disliked or liked. The author is far from being impartial in his exhibition of their character; the reader seems to be aware of him standing by with a stern moral purpose to emphasize their vices and their virtues. In his satires, on the other hand, he has a habit of turning round upon himself which may truly be called dramatic. He rails, and then rails at himself for railing; pours forth torrents of abuse upon the objects of his dislike,-dancing, fencing, sonnetteering dandies, apish scholars, pedants, gulls, perfumed inamoratos,—the vices, the effeminacies, the affectations of the time,—and then vituperates himself no less roundly as a vile, snarling, canker-eaten, rusty cur, who will rake everything into his tumbril, and cannot see good in anything. The Elizabethan time was too large and fullblooded, too full of sanguine aspiration, of prosperous bustle and variety, to be favourable to the production of satire. It was not sufficiently out of temper with itself to encourage the satirist. Marston's so-called satires are rather wild buffooneries, than the

offspring of deep-seated and savage indignation. Though the language is strong enough to warrant the idea that he was much offended by the profligacy and apish fopperies of the gilded youth of the time, and he makes himself out to be a terrible cynic, 'who cannot choose but bite,' he does not really bite, but only belabours with a clown's cudgel of inflated skin.

The eloquence of Hall's satires makes one hesitate to say that the language had not then been developed into a fitting instrument for polished satire, but, however this may be, Marston made no attempt at rapier-like thrusts of cynical wit. He guffawed at Hall's 'worthless satires,' and the graceful archaism of his style, which seemed to him as contemptible as any of the minor vices which the satirist undertook to expose. Hall in one of his satires expressed a wish that he could use the freedom of speech of the ancient satirists. Marston gratified this wish without scruple, to such an extent that he has been stigmatised as the most filthy and scurrilous writer of his time. To the first of these epithets Marston has some claim, but to call him scurrilous conveys an imputation of ill-nature which would be most undeserved. That he could write better things than the coarse, rugged, furious, ribald, broadlyhumorous couplets which he called satires, and which he estimated himself at their true value, when he took his 'solemn congé of this fusty world,' may be seen by any one who consults Charles Lamb's extracts from his plays, or better still, the plays themselves.

W. MINTO.

VOL. I.

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