One final and unapproachable
instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and
of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from
those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler
specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as
"a good jest for ever"--or rather as the best and therefore as the worst,
as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to
be cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learned
member, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient
tragedians: AEschylus--hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!--_AEschylus
was only a Marlowe_.
The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has
written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and
glory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never--be the humble avowal thus
blushingly recorded--it has never set down as the writer's opinion that
he was only an AEschylus. In other words, it has never registered as my
deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of
the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who
combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews;
who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with
the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare.
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