entered in the Stationers’ Registers on 8th September. A second edition of the Scourge, containing an additional satire (the tenth), appeared in 1599.

Pygmalion is written in the same metre as Venus and Adonis (from which poem Marston drew his inspiration)—a metre which Lodge had handled with considerable success. A poet who would approach the subject of Pygmalion and his image ought to be gifted with tact and delicacy. In our own day Mr. Morris (in The Earthly Paradise) has told the old Greek story in choice and fluent narrative verse; no poet could have treated it more gracefully. Tact and delicacy were precisely the qualities in which Marston was deficient; but the versification is tolerably smooth, and the licentiousness does not call for any special reprehension. In the Scourge of Villainy (sat. vi.) Marston pretends that

Pygmalion was written to bring contempt on the class of poems to which it belongs:—

“Hence, thou misjudging censor! know I wrote
Those idle rhymes to note the odious spot
And blemish that deforms the lineaments
Of modern poesy’s habiliments.”

But it would require keener observation than most readers possess to discover in Pygmalion any trace of that moral motive by which the poet claimed to have been inspired. Archbishop Whitgift did not approve of its moral tone, for in 1599 he ordered it to be committed to the flames with Sir John Davies’ Epigrams, Cutwode’s Caltha Poetarum, and other works of a questionable character. In Cranley’s Amanda, 1635, it is mentioned, in company with Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, as part of a courtezan’s library.

There is not much pleasure or profit to be derived from a perusal of Marston’s satires. The author deliberately adopted an uncouth and monstrous style of phraseology; his allusions are frequently quite unintelligible to modern readers, and even the wits of his contemporaries must have been sorely exercised. After a course of Marston’s satires Persius is clear as crystal. In the second satire there are some lines which aptly express the reader’s bewilderment:

"O darkness palpable; Egypt’s black night!
My wit is stricken blind, hath lost his sight:
My shins are broke with searching for some sense
To know to what his words have reference.”

Our sense is deafened by the tumult of noisy verbiage “as when a madman beats upon a drum.” In Marston’s satires there is little of the raciness and buoyancy that we find in the elder satirists—Skelton, Roy, and William Baldwin—who dealt good swashing blows in homely vigorous English. Persius would not have been flattered by Marston’s or Hall’s attempts at imitation: “nec pluteum cædit nec demorsos sapit ungues” would have been his comment on the spurious pseudo-classical Elizabethan satire. Hall claimed to have been the first to introduce classical satire into England. In the prologue to the first book of Virgidemiæ, 1597, he writes:—

“I first adventure with foolhardy might
To tread the steps of perilous despight:
I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist.”

It matters little whether Hall’s claim was well-founded or not; but it has been often pointed out that there is extant a MS. copy of Donne’s satires dated 1593. Hall, who lived to be one of the glories of the English Church, in early manhood certainly did not present an example of Christian meekness and charity. He took a very low view of contemporary writers, but never had the slightest misgivings about his own abilities. It is not easy to ascertain how his quarrel with Marston arose, but it seems clear that he was the aggressor. Pygmalion was published a year later than Virgidemiæ, but it had probably been circulated in manuscript, according to the

custom of the time, before it issued from the press. There can be little doubt that the ninth satire of book i. of Virgidemiæ, is directed against Marston. The opening lines run thus:—

“Envy, ye Muses, at your thrilling mate,
Cupid hath crowned a new laureat;
I saw his statue gaily tired in green,
As if he had some second Phœbus been;
His statue trimm’d with the Venerean tree
And shrined fair within your sanctuary.
What! he that erst to gain the rhyming goal,
The worn recital-post of capitol,
Rhymed in rules of stewish ribaldry
Teaching experimental bawdery,
Whiles th’ itching vulgar, tickled with the song,
Hanged on their unready poet’s tongue?
Take this, ye patient Muses, and foul shame
Shall wait upon your once profaned name.”

When Pygmalion was published Hall wrote a poor epigram (see vol. iii. p. 369), which he contrived to paste in those copies of the poem “that came to the stationers at Cambridge.”[8] One of the satires, entitled “Reactio,”[9]

appended to Pygmalion, is a violent attack on Hall. In his “Defiance to Envy,” prefixed to Virgidemiæ, Hall had boasted that he could, an’ that he would, hold his own with any of the poets,—even hinting that he was a match for Spenser. The “Defiance” is a well-written piece of verse, but it gave Marston an excellent opportunity, which he used to the full in “Reactio,” of making a very effective attack. In the first satire of book vi. of Virgidemiæ Hall replies to Marston’s raillery with less vigour than we should have expected. Again and again in The Scourge of Villainy Marston attacks Hall; he would not let the quarrel drop, but worried his adversary with the pertinacity of a bull-dog. In 1601 a certain “W. I.,” who has been doubtfully identified (by Dr. Nicholson) with a Cambridge man, William Ingram, published The Whipping of the Satire, which was chiefly directed against Marston (with gibes at Ben Jonson and others). There is a lengthy and spirited preface, in which Marston is taken to task after this fashion:—

“Think you that foul words can beget fair manners? If you do I will not bate you an ace of an ass, for experience gives you the lie to your face. But your affection over-rules your reason, and therefore you are as sudden of passion in all matters as an interjection and yet as defective in most cases as an heteroclite: you gathered up men’s sins as though they had been strawberries, and picked away their virtues as they had been but the stalks. They shall not make me believe but that you were the devil’s intelligencer, for there went not a lie abroad but it was presently entertained of your ear;