There I saw Desire sit,

That my heart with love had hit,
Laying forth bright beauty's hooks
To entrap my gazing looks.
Love I did, and 'gan to woo,

Pray and sigh; all would not do:
Women, when they take the toy,
Covet to be counted coy.

Coy she was, and I 'gan court;
She thought love was but a sport;
Profound hell was in my thought;
Such a pain desire had wrought,
That I sued with sighs and tears;
Still ingrate she stopped her ears,
Till my youth I had spent.
Last a passion of repent

Told me flat, that Desire

Was a brond of love's fire,
Which consumeth men in thrall,
Virtue, youth, wit, and all.
At this saw, back I start,
Beat Desire from my heart,

Shook off Love, and made an oath
To be enemy to both.

Old I was when thus I fled

Such fond toys as cloyed my head,
But this I learned at Virtue's gate,
The way to good is never late.'

SONG.

Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content;
The quiet mind is richer than a crown;
Sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent ;

The poor estate scorns fortune's angry frown:

Such sweet content, such minds, such sleep, such bliss, Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss.

The homely house that harbours quiet rest;

The cottage that affords no pride nor care; The mean that 'grees with country music best; The sweet consort of mirth and music's fare; Obscured life sets down a type of bliss: A mind content both crown and kingdom is.

PHILOMELA'S ODE.

Sitting by a river's side,

Where a silent stream did glide,
Muse I did of many things,
That the mind in quiet brings.
I 'gan think how some men deem
Gold their god; and some esteem
Honour is the chief content,

That to man in life is lent.
And some others do contend,
Quiet none, like to a friend.
Others hold, there is no wealth
Compared to a perfect health.
Some man's mind in quiet stands,
When he is lord of many lands:
But I did sigh, and said all this
Was but a shade of perfect bliss ;
And in my thoughts I did approve,
Nought so sweet as is true love.
Love 'twixt lovers passeth these,
When mouth kisseth and heart 'grees,
With folded arms and lips meeting,
Each soul another sweetly greeting;

For by the breath the soul fleeteth,
And soul with soul in kissing meeteth.

If love be so sweet a thing,

That such happy bliss doth bring,
Happy is love's sugared thrall,

But unhappy maidens all,

Who esteem your virgin blisses,
Sweeter than a wife's sweet kisses.
No such quiet to the mind,

As true Love with kisses kind:
But if a kiss prove unchaste,
Then is true love quite disgraced.
Though love be sweet, learn this of mc,
No sweet love but honesty.

ORPHEUS' SONG.

He that did sing the motions of the stars,
Pale-coloured Phoebe's borrowing of her light,
Aspects of planets oft opposed in jars,

Of Hesper, henchman to the day and night;
Sings now of love, as taught by proof to sing,
Women are false, and love a bitter thing.

I loved Eurydice, the brightest lass,

More fond to like so fair a nymph as she; In Thessaly so bright none ever was,

But fair and constant hardly may agree: False-hearted wife to him that loved thee well, To leave thy love, and choose the prince of hell!

Theseus did help, and I in haste did hie

To Pluto, for the lass I lovèd so:

The god made grant, and who so glad as I?
I tuned my harp, and she and I 'gan go;
Glad that my love was left to me alone,
I looked back, Eurydice was gone:

She slipped aside, back to her latest love,
Unkind, she wronged her first and truest feere !
Thus women's loves delight, as trial proves
By false Eurydice I loved so dear,

To change and fleet, and every way to shrink,
To take in love, and lose it with a wink.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

[CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE was born at Canterbury in February, 1564, and educated at the King's School in his birth-place, and at Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. He was killed in a tavern brawl, and was buried at Deptford, June 1, 1593. The dates and order of his works are somewhat uncertain. Of his plays, the first, Tamburlaine the Great, a tragedy in two parts, must have been acted in public by 1587. It was followed by The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta (probably in 1589 or 1590), The Massacre at Paris (not earlier than the end of 1589), Edward II, and The Tragedy of Queen Dido, which was probably left unfinished at Marlowe's death, and completed by Nash. Another play, Lust's Dominion, was for some time wrongly attributed to Marlowe ; but, in return for this injustice, the probability that he may have had at least a share in Shakespeare's 2 and 3 Henry VI, or in the plays on which those dramas were based, is now rather widely admitted. Of his poems, the translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia are of uncertain date. The Passionate Shepherd to his Love was first printed complete in England's Helicon, 1600, but is quoted in The Jew of Malta. Hero and Leander was left unfinished at Marlowe's death; Chapman completed it, dividing, Marlowe's fragment into two parts, which now form the first two Sestiads of the poem.]

Marlowe has one claim on our affection which everyone is ready to acknowledge; he died young. We think of him along with Chatterton and Burns, with Byron, Shelley, and Keats. And this is a fact of some importance for the estimate of his life and genius. His poetical career lasted only six or seven years, and he did not outlive his 'hot days, when the mad blood's stirring.' An old ballad tells us that he acted at the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch and 'brake his leg in one rude scene, When in his early age.' If there is any truth in the last statement, we may suppose that Marlowe gave up acting and confined himself to authorship. He seems to have depended for his livelihood on his connection with the stage; and probably, like many of his fellows and friends, he lived in a free and even reckless way. A more unusual characteristic of Marlowe's was his 'atheism.' No reliance can be placed on the

details recorded on this subject; but it was apparently only his death that prevented judicial proceedings being taken against him on account of his opinions. The note on which these proceedings would have been founded was the work of one Bame, who thought that 'all men in christianitei ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped,' and was hanged at Tyburn about eighteen months afterwards. But other testimony points in the same direction; and a celebrated passage in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit would lead us to suppose that Marlowe was given to blatant profanities. Whatever his offences may have been-and there is nothing to make us think he was a bad-hearted man-he had no time to make men forget them. He was not thirty when he met his death.

The plan of the present volumes excludes selections from Marlowe's plays; but as his purely poetical works give but a one-sided idea of his genius, and as his importance in the history of literature depends mainly on his dramatic writings, some general reference 'must be made to them. Even if they had no enduring merits of their own, their effect upon Shakespeare-an effect which, to say nothing of Henry VI, is most clearly visible in Richard III—and their influence on the drama would preserve them from neglect. The nature of this influence may be seen by a glance at Marlowe's first play. On the one hand it stands at the opposite pole to the classic form of the drama as it is found in Seneca, a form which had been adopted in Gorboduc, and which some of the more learned writers attempted to nationalise. There is no Chorus in Tamburlaine or in any of Marlowe's plays except Dr. Faustus ; and the action takes place on the stage instead of being merely reported. On the other hand, in this, the first play in blank verse which was publicly acted, he called the audience

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,'

and fixed the metre of his drama for ever as the metre of English tragedy. And, though neither here nor in Dr. Faustus could he yet afford to cast off all the conceits of clownage, he was in effect beginning to substitute works of art for the formless popular representations of the day. Doubtless it was only a beginning. The two parts of Tamburlaine are not great tragedies. They are full of mere horror and glare. Of the essence of drama, a sustained and developed action, there is as yet very little; and what action there