" The author of _King Edward
III_. was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe,
not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence from
all attraction towards the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits"; and
fitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing,
half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punier
limbs the young giant's newly fashioned buskin of blank verse. The signs
of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are
perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting and
irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of a
double authorship. For the intelligence which moulds and informs the
whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is
of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, a
touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce.
Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no less
indiscernible to the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demerits
of this play, they are due to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness or
haste.
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