ABSTRACT
If ever there was a born poet, Marlowe was one. He perceived things in their spiritual as well as material relations, and impressed them with a corresponding felicity. Rather, he struck them as with something sweet and glowing that rushes by; – perfumes from a censer, – glances of love and beauty. And he could accumulate images into as deliberate and lofty a grandeur. Chapman said of him, that he stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood. Marlowe enjoys the singular and (so far) unaccountable honour of being the only English writer to whom Shakspeare seems to have alluded with approbation. The ranting part of Marlowe’s reputation has been chiefly owing to the tragedy of Tamburlaine, a passage in which is laughed at in Henry the Fourth, and has become famous.
