Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/893
quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear.
“A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap, A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate, Anchoes, caviare, but hee's satyred And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy sparre Of slimie neughtes, when troth, phantas- ticknesse That which the naturall sophysters tearme
- Phantasia incoopossess* is a function
Even of the bright immortall part of man. It is the common passe, the sacred dore, Unto the prive chamber of the soule; That back, nought passeth past the baser court, Of outward scence by it th’ inamorate Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beau- tie Of his lov'd mistress.”—Vol. I. p. 241.
In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough:—
“And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn Of slimy newts”;—
and
“past the baser court Of outward sense”;—
but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here described by our *first compagnon*? Again, (Vol. II. pp. 85-56,) we read, “This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, and a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to me, and men of pro-found reach instruct abundantly; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes,” etc.
This Granuffo is qualified among the “Interlocutors” as “a silent lord,” and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lemon kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. It is plain enough that the pas-sage should read, “a man of excellent dis-course, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abun-dantly,” etc.
In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Bocace was said to have done for Pope in his Ho-mer,—“gone before and swept the way.”
An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not be as tough as to us as Eschylus to a ten-years' graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shock of misprints and mis-pointings only to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech of *Erichtho*, in the first scene of the fourth act of “*Sophonisba*,” (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in this shape:—
“— hardly the reverent (!) ruines Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove Whose very rubbish . . . yet beares A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,] Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings, So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow, The ill-voye'd raven, and still chattering pye, Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth; Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs, —Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men Stood in assured rest,” etc.
The verse and a half in Italics are worthy of Chapman; but why did not Mr. Halli-well, who explains up-point and *I* um, change “Joves acts were vively limbs” to “Jove's acts were vively limned,” which was un-questionably what Marston wrote?
In the “*Scourge* of *Villanie,” (Vol. III. p. 252,) there is a passage which has a modern application in America, though happily archaic in England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand thus:—
“Once Albion lived in such a cruel age Than man did hold by servile vilenage; Poore beasts were slaves of bondmen that were borne,