In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of music
with the words appended--in such jewelled volumes as _England's Helicon_
and _Davison's Poetical Rhapsody_--their name is Legion, their numbers
are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all
of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master
or a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of
dramatic writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them
all--the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot
count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to
continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and
Peele, their first and most famous leaders.
No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in
any art than the author of _David and Bethsabe_ has found in the writer
of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace
and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and
equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but
compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master's we may fairly
call it vigorous and condensed.
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