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xviii but it should be remarked that his accusers were the Puritans, the inveterate enemies of stage-players and poets; and that Marlow seems to have aimed a blow at them in his Edward the Second, where young Spencer addressing the scholar Baldock ridicules the hypocritical pedant, who says a long grace at the table's end, wears a little band, buttons like pins heads, and is

"Curate-like, in his attire, Though inwardly licentious enough."

This would never be forgiven or forgotten, his ridicule of their sacred persons would render him more obnoxious than absolute Atheism. Accordingly the fanatic Thomas Beard, in his "Theatre of God's Judgments ," gladly availed himself of the unfortunate catastrophe of Marlow's untimely death, to show that it was an immediate judgment of Heaven. He represents him as "giving too large a swing to his own wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reins, so that he fell to that outrage and extremity, as Jodelle