Note 1287 — Chapter XV

These three gifted men (Peele, Greene, and Marlowe), says their late editor, Mr. Dyce (Peele’s Works, preface xxxv.), though they often present to us pictures that in design and colouring outrage the truth of nature, are the earliest of our tragic writers who exhibit any just delineation of the workings of passion; and their language, though now swelling into bombast, and now sinking into meanness, is generally rich with poetry, while their versification, though somewhat monotonous, is almost always flowing and harmonious. They as much excel their immediate predecessors as they are themselves excelled by Shakspeare. Not quite as much.