NOTE.

MINDFUL of the good old apologue regarding "the
squeak of the real pig," I think it here worth while to
certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly
impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so
often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as
select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published
utterances from the "pink soft litter" of a living brood-
from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an
abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through
the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and un-
approachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal
example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did
not venture to impair by transference from those columns
and transplantation into these pages among humbler
specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once
more on record as a good jest for ever
the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and
therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be
cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles,
said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shake-
speare among the ancient tragedians: Æschylus-hear,
O heaven, and give ear, O earth !—Æschylus was only a
Marlowe.

-or rather as

The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher

:

Marlowe it has never-be the humble avowal thus blushingly recorded-it has never set down as the writer's opinion that he was only an Æschylus. In other words, it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews; who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare.