tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all to
the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have
been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing
before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had
skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was
so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the
great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser
Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and
strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in
science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;--it is in
these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative
impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.

In the second historic play which can be wholly ascribed to Shakespeare
we still find the poetic or rhetorical duality for the most part in
excess of the dramatic; but in _King Richard III_. the bonds of rhyme at
least are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare's plays belongs
absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master,
and that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. Here at last
we can see that Shakespeare has decidedly chosen his side. It is as
fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often though never
so inflated in expression, as _Tamburlaine_ itself. It is doubtless a
better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say, than Marlowe
ever could have done. It is not for any man to measure, above all is it
not for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take on
himself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce, what it is that
Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but, dying as he did and when he
did, it is certain that he has not left us a work so generally and so
variously admirable as _King Richard III_. As certain is it that but for
him this play could never have been written. At a later date the subject