answer them, there was nothing in it disagreeing, nor anything-as I protest there is not-but of the universal notions of ambition and envy, the perpetual argument of books and tragedies. I did not say you encouraged me unto the presenting of it. If I should, I had been a villain; for that when I showed it to your honour, I was not resolved to have had it acted; nor should it have been, had not my necessities overmastered me. And, therefore, I beseech you, let not an Earl of Devonshire overthrow what a Lord Mountjoy hath done who hath done me good; and I have done him honour. The world must and shall know my innocence, whilst I have a pen to show it. For that I know I shall live inter historiam temporis, as well as greater men, I must not be such an object unto myself as to neglect my reputation. And having been known throughout all England for my virtue, I will not leave a stain of villainy upon my name, whatsoever else might 'scape me unfortunately, through my indiscretion and misunderstanding of the time. Wherein, good my Lord, mistake not my heart, that hath been and is a sincere honourer of you and seeks you now for no other end, but to clear itself and to be held as I am, though I never come

near you more.

Your honour's poor follower and faithful servant,

SAMUEL DANIEL.

(Calendar of State Papers-Domestic Series-Reign of Elizabeth, 1602-1603-London, 1857.)

But though Daniel had been able to disprove the charge of disloyalty, his enemies did not relax their malignant efforts. Ben Jonson,

who, compared with him, was only a mechanical and uncouth rhymster, was put forward to supersede and did practically supersede him in the laureateship, and lost no opportunity of depreciating him. Thus he told Sir William Drummond that Daniel was a good, honest man, but no poet; and that only he (Jonson) and Chapman knew how to write a court masque (Jonson's Works, iii. 490). And Daniel's own words show that, so early as 1607, he had lost much of his popularity. Thus, in the dedication to Prince Henry prefixed to 'Philotas,' 1607, we read :

And I, although among the latter train,

And least of all that sung unto this land,
Have borne my part, though in an humble strain,
And pleased the gentler that did understand;
And never had my harmless pen at all
Distained with any loose immodesty,
Nor ever noted to be touched with gall
To aggravate the worst man's infamy,
But still have done the fairest offices

To virtue and the time. Yet nought prevails,
And all our labours are without success;

For either favour or our virtue fails.
And, therefore, since I have outlived the date
Of former grace, acceptance and delight,

I would my lines, late-born beyond the fate

Of her (Elizabeth's) spent line, had never come to

light.

So had I not been taxed for wishing well,
Nor now mistaken by the censuring stage,
Nor in my name and reputation fell,

Which I esteem more than what all the age
Or earth can give. But years have done this wrong
To make me write too much and live too long.

For some years Daniel nevertheless withstood the secret hostility which had been raised against him; but in 1615 he left London for ever, and retired to a small farm, probably provided by the Countess of Pembroke, at Beckington, near Phillips Norton, in his native county; where he died four years after, at the early age of fifty-seven. His old pupil, after she had become a widow, erected a monument to him in Beckington church.

Christopher Marlowe, the greatest genius, perhaps, of the whole fraternity, was the son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, and was born there in 1565. He was educated first at the King's School in that city and afterwards at Benet's College, Cambridge, which he entered as a pensioner in 1580, taking the degree of A.B. in 1583 and A.M. in 1587. He seems to have commenced dramatic composition while he was still at the university, the first part of his tragedy of ‘Tamburlain' having been produced at

the Curtain in 1587. Either then, or later he became one of the actors at the Curtain, and continued in that employment until incapacitated by an accident, in which he broke his leg. We next hear of him (1592) not only as writing plays for Shakespeare's company, but as participating in their debauchery, until their "loose lives" had made religion loathsome "in his ears. And it is a matter of notoriety that he lived and died a professed atheist. It is, however, remarkable that all the plays which bear his name were acted, not at the Blackfriars theatre, with which Shakespeare was connected, but at the Curtain, with which he had nothing to do. Marlowe's career as a littérateur was eminently successful; and we hear nothing in his case, either of poverty or persecution. He was fatally wounded during an affray in a brothel at Deptford, and died some days after, before he had attained his twenty-ninth year (June 1593).

Now these biographies, as a whole, show we have not exaggerated the facts in our general description of the poor scholars; but the last two may convince us that their misfortunes were not entirely due to natural causes. A

powerful conspiracy seems to have existed against them. And its modus operandi was marked by the deepest subtlety. If the literate were viciously inclined, it allowed him full means of indulgence; if his inclination were to virtue, no effort was spared to counteract his exertions. It was undoubtedly a clever scheme; and the conspirators, as they watched the game, might always have been saying, "Heads, we win; tails, you lose." For, if Daniel's experience shows how difficult they made it for a virtuous man to succeed, Marlowe's shows how easy they made it for a vicious one to fail.