that clean and unsophisticated wit, which is natural to that incomparable poet[1]."
Marlow, though fully appreciated in his own day, suffered considerably during the reign of French taste, when the rules were the only standard of excellence, and when Dr. Johnson wrote and printed with applause in his edition of Shakspeare, a series of cold, antithetical critiques, whose contemptuous brevity seems to intimate that, in his own conceit, the great moralist was a god to punish the fancied lapses of the sweet Swan, not a mortal to adore. The attention to black letter (as it was termed) which was then beginning to prevail, called the name, if not the works, of Marlow into notice; and Malone properly observed, "that he was the most famous and admired poet of that age, previous to the appearance of Shakspeare." In 1808 his plays came under the judgment of Charles Lamb, in his pithy, and deeply-weighed characters of the Elizabethan Dramatists:—
- ↑ Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum. By Sir E. Brydges. Lond. 1800, p. 113.
