guese used to relieve themselves, and from that island God hath suffered me to return to England. All which services, with myself, I humbly prostrate at her majesty's feet, desiring the Almighty long to continue her reign among us; for at this day she is the most famous and virtuous princess that liveth in the world." In With the means of gratification his old habits had returned upon him, but Cavendish was less fortunate in his second voyage. Within three years after his arrival from his first cruise, he determined to put to sea again for the purpose of recruiting his exhausted finances. His ship the Desire, was on this occasion commanded by the celebrated navigator John Davis. They put to sea on the 26th of August, and on the 5th of December, they pillaged Placengia, a Portuguese settlement on the coast of Brazil. On the 14th of April, they entered the straits, but symptoms of dissatisfaction and mutinies had already shown themselves amongst the squadron, the weather became stormy, and Cavendish and Davis held different opinions as to the course to be pursued after clearing the straits. The majority of the crew also differed from both. this emergency Cavendish agreed to return to Brazil for supplies, and then to attempt the trade again, and they accordingly shaped their course eastwards; but on the 20th of May, Davis in the Desire, was separated from the Leicester galleys in which Cavendish had embarked. It was certainly not the intention of Davis to desert his master, although Cavendish charges him with it. The ships had in fact lost sight of each other, and by a series of unfortunate circumstances which neither commander could control, were prevented rejoining. Cavendish soon afterwards lost all command of his crew, who insisted on returning to England, declaring that they could no longer peril their lives in his profitless service. With bitter reluctance he yielded to the necessity of his situation, but his proud spirit could not support the indignity thus put upon him, and before the Leicester came in sight of England. her gallant commander had expired. Christopher Marlowe. BORN CIR. A. D. 1562.-DIED CIR. A. D. 1593. Mr ELLIS conjectures that this great dramatist was born about the year 1562. There is no account extant of his family. Baker informs us that he was of Bennet college, Cambridge; and that he took the degree of M. A. there in 1587, He came to a tragical and premature end about the year 1593. "It happened," says Wood, "that he fell deeply in love with a low girl, and had for his rival a fellow in livery, who looked more like a pimp than a lover. Marlowe, fired with jealousy, and having some reason to believe that his mistress granted the fellow favours, rushed upon him to stab him with his dagger; but the footman being quick, arrested the stroke, and catching hold of Marlowe's wrist, stabbed him with his own weapon, and notwithstanding all the assistance of the surgery, he soon after died of the wound, before the year 1593." This story occurs in Beard's • Theatre of God's Judgments,' and in a work, which probably preceded the Theatre. Vaughan's 'Golden Grove.' Vaughan says that the catastrophe happened at Deptford, and that the name of Marlowe's antagonist was Ingram. Aubrey fixes the murder on a rival poet, Ben Jonson. A Monthly reviewer has thrown out the suspicion that Christopher Marlowe is but a borrowed designation of the great Shakspeare, "who disappears from all biographical research just at the moment when Marlowe first comes on the stage, and who reappears in his proper name in 1592, when a strange story was put in circulation that Marlowe had been recently assassinated with his own sword, which may," says the reviewer, "be allegorically true." In support of this theory, the reviewer goes on to point out the habitual resemblance of style between these two writers; and notices the fact, that the name of Marlowe as if being fictitious it were common property-was borrowed successively, after the pretended death of Marlowe, by several authors.' We think there is a refinement of scepticism in this theory of the identity of our two great dramatists. Judging from the internal evidence of their works alone, we are at a loss to conceive how any English critic should have come to the conclusion that Marlowe was only another name for the matchless Shakspeare. Not to count on any other points of difference, the want of unity and coherence so observable in all Marlowe's dramas, must for ever mark him out as one longo intervallo proximus' to Shakspeare. A serious accusation has been preferred against Marlowe, which seems to have originated with Beard, namely, that he was an atheist, and "not only in word blasphemed the Trinity, but also, as it was credibly reported, wrote divers discourses against it, affirming our Saviour to be a deceiver, and Moses to be a conjurer,-the Holy Bible to contain only idle stories, and all religions but a device of policy." Bishop Tanner calls him atheista et blasphemus horrendus;' and Hawkens says of him, that "he was an excellent poet, but of abandoned morals, and of the most impious principles-a complete libertine, and an avowed atheist." All this rests, as we have observed, on the single authority of Beard, and he, after all, merely professes to make the statement upon hearsay! One is ready to ask where are the several blasphemous discourses which Marlowe penned? No one has seen them; and Greene, his intimate friend, when reproving him for his dissipated life, brings no such charge against him as Beard insinuates. No one can deny that Marlowe led a sensual and vicious life, but it is altogether unjust to accuse him of having penned a systematic attack upon the foundations of religion, without much better evidence than has yet been offered to substantiate so grave a charge. · Marlowe has written six plays; he also assisted Nash in his tragedy of Dido,' and Day in the comedy of The Maiden's Holiday,' which was never printed. The first and second, and part of the third sestiads of the of Hero and Leander' are known to have been written by 6 poem him; he also translated the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia' into English blank verse, and the Elegies' of Ovid. The licentiousness of the Ovidean muse was rendered by him with such fidelity that his book was condemned and burnt at Stationer's hall, in 1599, by order of the archbishop of Canterbury. We have already alluded to the principal defect in Marlowe's dra Monthly Rev., vol. xxiii, pp. 61-63. matic writings, their unskilful construction and the general want of coherence in their parts. Perhaps the most free from this defect of all his plays is that entitled 'Lust's Dominion.' But the best idea of Marlowe's powers, and also of his weaknesses, will be formed from his 'Faustus.' This play was always a favourite in those days, when witchcraft and magic were more implicitly believed in than now. It contains a good deal of low buffoonery and bombast, but has many passages of extraordinary power, and one scene in particular of tremendous interest, from which we must be allowed to quote rather fully: (The clock strikes eleven.) Faust. Oh, Faustus! Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, The Faustus may repent, and save his soul. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, And see, a threatening arm, an angry brow. Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud; That, when you vomit forth into the air, (The watch strikes.) Oh! half the hour is past: 'twill all be past anon. Ah! Pythagoras' metemsycosis! were that true, All beasts are happy, for when they die, "1st Scho, Come, gentlemen, let us go visit Faustus, For such a dreadful night was never seen Since first the world's creation did begin; Such fearful shrieks and cries were never heard ; Pray heaven the doctor have escaped the danger' 2d Scho. Oh, help us, heavens! see, here are Faustus' limbs, All torn asunder by the hand of death. 3d Scho. The devils who Faustus served have torn him thus; For, 'twixt the hours of twelve and one, methought I heard him shriek, and cry aloud for help; At which self-time the house seem'd all on fire, With dreadful horror of these damned fiends " Spenser. BORN CIR. A. d. 1553.—died a. d. 1596. THE century that immediately followed the death of Chaucer constitutes the most stormy period in the annals of England. The ill-established usurpation of the house of Lancaster, shaken by repeated insurrections, even during the life of its able founder, and illustrated rather than invigorated by the brilliant career of his heroic son, became at last, under the feeble sceptre of the sixth Henry, only a watch-word for awakening the fury of a divided population, and stirring the atrocities of a contest, which, whether we look to its protracted and exhausting fluctuations, or to the savage and unsparing character of its ever reciprocating barbarities, is without a parallel among all the great national tragedies that have at any other time spread bloodshed and desolation over our land. It was not till the tyranny of Richard was overthrown at Bosworth, and Henry VII. had united in his own favour the suffrages of all the parties in the state by his marriage with the only remaining daughter of the house of York, that men could be said to enjoy so much as a breathing time from the work of mutual slaughter, either in the field or on the scaffold. "This," says Hume, speaking of the battle of St Alban's, in 1455, "was the first blood spilt in that fatal quarrel, which was not finished in less than a course of fifty years, which was signalized by twelve pitched battles, which opened a scene of extraordinary fierceness and cruelty, is computed to have lost the lives of eighty princes of the blood, and almost entirely annihilated the ancient nobility of England." It is not to be wondered at that, amid the distraction of a time such as this, the voice of song was silent. The ears of men were too much occupied with other notes to be in tune for listening to those of the poet's lyre. With the exception, accordingly, of the obscure names of Occleve and Lydgate, and a mob of other mere versifiers still less deserving of attention, the history of English poetry is a blank from the death of Gower, the contemporary and friend of Chaucer, in the beginning of the 15th century to the appearance of Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, more than a hundred and fifty years after. The publication of the poems of these two brother-bards was followed, after a short interval, by that of the singular work entitled, the Mirror of Magistrates,' only memorable, in a literary point of view, on account of two very remarkable poems which it contains, the productions of Thomas Sackville, then a very young man, and probably a student of law, but afterwards ennobled by the titles of Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. Edmund Spenser, one of the very greatest of our poets, is supposed to have been born about the year 1553, although even the researches of his latest biographer, Mr Todd, have not succeeded in absolutely determining the date. He was born in East Smithfield, London,— 'merry London,' as he calls it himself in one of his poems, the Prothalamion, "My most kindly nurse, 99 That to me gave this life's most native source.' Of his parents not a notice or tradition has come down to usexcept that in his collection of sonnets entitled Amoretti,' he speaks of his mother's name as being Elizabeth. It appears, however, from various passages in his works, that he considered himself to be a connexion of the noble house of Spenser, or Spencer, and that the relationship was recognized by the principal branches of the family. Of his boyhood nothing is known. He appears by the college-records to have entered as a sizer of Pembroke-hall, Cambridge, on the 20th of May, 1569, and here he seems to have remained till he took his degree of A.M. on the 26th of June, 1576. His future productions amply testify how industriously he had employed the period of his academic residence in storing his mind with extensive, varied, and accurate learning. He is supposed to have finally left college in consequence of some disappointment which he met with, or of something which he and his friends construed into an act of injustice on the part of the authorities. Mr Todd is of opinion that he had before this time published some anonymous compositions in verse, and there seems to be no doubt, at any rate, that he had already acquired among his acquaintances a reputation for poetical abilities. One of the most intimate of his college friends was Gabriel Harvey, himself a poet, and also the author of several works in prose. It was Harvey who first drew Spenser to London. On quitting the university, the poet had, in the first instance, gone to reside with some of his relations in the north of England, in the capacity, as is conjectured, of domestic tutor; but, on Harvey's urgent representations, he was induced, in 1578, to come up to the metropolis, then, as it has ever since been, the grand theatre for the struggles of literary ambition. His time in the country had not been idly spent; and, besides a prose discourse entitled the 'English Poet,' which was never published, he brought many poetical compositions to town with him. Immediately on his arrival he was introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney, already one of the most distinguished patrons, as well as most promising ornaments of English literature. Sidney, besides recommending Spenser to the favour of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, took him with him to his seat at Penshurst, in Kent, and detained him there for some time, availing himself, |