University of Virginia Library

No want of reverence for the superb and epoch-making genius of Marlowe is intended in this comment on what is acknowledged to be his crudest production—“this huffing tragedy,” as Leigh Hunt, a perfervid Marlovian, very properly called it.

For the information of those whom it may possibly interest I may mention that the greater number of the four-line pieces here called “Miniatures” are from my little volume, Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, published provincially in 1884. The common sort of epigram—the epigram which, as Boileau says, “n'est souvent qu'un bon-mot”—was seldom the kind of plant I cultivated, my affections being set on a rarer variety. The little volume, like my still earlier book, The Prince's Quest— which Kegan Paul issued at the beginning of 1880, its author being then twenty-one—was published at my father's cost and found literally no buyers till several years later, except a few personal friends of the epigrammatist. It is pleasant, however, to recall the fact that it received one very kind and cordial though almost solitary piece of recognition, in the shape of an article contributed to the Oxford Magazine by Dr J. W. Mackail, whose many and eminent distinctions were still, for the most part, things yet to be.

Looking back I cannot remember to have scattered very lavishly among my early friends the little book of which I am speaking. But I recall that in one copy—before bestowing it

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