Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/584

556 alleged in excuse of his attempt to serve two masters, the king whom he had deserted and the king who had received him into favour, is that not one of his associates was without sin in this respect.

The books on Marlborough are very numerous. Under his name in the catalogue of the British Museum there are 121 entries, and 32 under that of his wife. The chief works are Lediard's, Coxe's, and Alison's Lives; a French memoir in 3 volumes, 1808; Marlborough's Letters and Despatches, edited by Sir George Murray (5 volumes); and Mrs Creighton's interesting summary. The descriptions in Mr John Hill Burton's Reign of Queen Anne of the battle scenes of Marlborough are from personal observation. A good account of his birthplace and country will be found in Pulman's Book of the Axe District; and for the home of the duchess the reader can refer to Mr Cussan's History of Hertfordshire. Long after the death of the duke there were many pamphlets written on the conduct of his wife from her appearance at court; but they relate to matters of little interest at the present time.

 MARLOW,, a parliamentary borough of Buckinghamshire, England, is finely situated on the Thames, and on a branch of the Great Western Railway, 37 miles west of London and 25 south-east of Oxford. It consists principally of two streets which cross each other at right angles. The church of All Saints, in the Later English style, erected in 1835, and lately extensively restored, possesses a number of brasses. The former bluecoat school has been reorganized under the endowed schools commission as a grammar school. The town has paper-mills, a brewery, and manufactures of lace and embroidery. It is also a favourite resort for boating and fishing. Marlow, anciently Merlaw, is a very ancient manor, and for some time after William the Conqueror it was in the possession of the crown. It returned members to parliament from the 28th of Edward I. till the 2d of Edward II., and the privilege was again restored in the 21st of James I.; since 1868 it has returned but one member. The borough includes Great and Little Marlow, Medmenham, and Bisham in Berkshire, which is united with Great Marlow by a suspension bridge, erected in 1835, at a cost of £20,000. The population of the borough, which has an area of 14,514 acres, 2424 being in the county of Berks, was 6627 in 1871 and 6779 in 1881.

 MARLOWE, (1564-1593), the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse, was born at Canterbury in February 1564, and christened on the 26th of that month. John Marlowe, his father, is said, on authority which satisfied the best editor of the poet, to have been a shoemaker by trade; it is supposed also that lie was clerk of his parish, and survived his illustrious son for upwards of eleven years. The boy was educated at the King's School, Canterbury; matriculated as pensioner of Benet College, Cambridge, March 17, 1581; took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1583, and that of master of arts four years later. Before this date he had produced the first tragedy worthy of that name in our language, and called into existence that highest and most difficult of all its other than lyrical forms of verse, which alone has proved worthy of acceptance among his countrymen as the fit and adequate instrument of tragic drama. At some uncertain date of his early life he is supposed to have been an actor, and said to have broken his leg in the practice of his profession. But for this and many other traditions of his career and conversation there is no better evidence than that of a religious libeller. His first tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, was successively followed by Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and The Massacre at Paris. The tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, was probably completed for the stage after his death by Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure, and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities of a social and personal satirist; a man gifted also with some fair faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in no wise qualified to put on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from among the worthiest of his fellows.

The only authentic record concerning the death of Marlowe is an entry "in the burial-register of the parish church of St Nicholas," Deptford: "Christopher Marlowe, slain by Francis Archer, June 1, 1593." Two Puritan scribblers have left two inconsistent reports as to the circumstances of this manslaughter. On the more respectable authority of Francis Meres the critic (1598) we are told that Marlowe was "stabbed to death" by a "serving-man" of bad character, "a rival of his in his lewd love." The one thing unhappily certain is that one of the greatest among English poets died of a wound received in a brawl (stabbed in the head, according to one account, with his own dagger) at the untimely age of twenty-nine years and three months. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and a few less memorable men of the same generation, he was attacked in his own time not merely as a freethinker, but as a propagandist or apostle of atheism; nor was the irregularity of his life thought worthier of animadversion than the uncertainty of his livelihood. The informer whose name has survived as that of his most venomous assailant was duly hanged the year after Marlowe's death; and the list of his charges, first published by Ritson, is hardly a document which can commend itself to any man's confidence as plausibly or even possibly accurate in all its detailed report of the violent and offensive nonsense attributed to the freethinking poet in common conversation "concerning his damnable opinions."

The majestic and exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts. With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in Tamburlaine the Great; and for two grave reasons it must always be remembered with distinction and mentioned with honour. It is the first poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest passages, perhaps indeed the noblest in the literature of the world, ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of music and the proper tone of colour for the finest touches of poetic execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease upon every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a man who had literally no models before him, and probably or evidently was often if not always compelled to write against time for his living.

The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the Faustus of his English predecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject is somewhat more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the sneering references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from the ignorance of Byron or the incompetence of Hallam. And the particular note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude