BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. CHRISTOPHER MARLOW. different countries, "calls up spirits from HRISTOPHER MARLOW the vasty deep" and revels in luxury and was the son of a shoema- splendor. At length the time expires, the ker, and was born at Can- bond becomes due, and a party of evil spirits terbury, Kent, in 1562. He enter, amid thunder and lightning, to claim was educated at Bennet Col- his forfeited life and person. Such a plot lege, Cambridge, and took afforded scope for deep passion and variety his master's degree in 1587. of adventure, and Marlow has constructed He had, however, previous from it a powerful though irregular play. to this commenced his career Scenes and passages of terrific grandeur as a dramatist and written and most thrilling agony are intermixed his tragedy of Tamberlaine with low humor and preternatural machinthe Great, which was suc- ery often ludicrous and grotesque. The amcessfully brought upon the stage and long bition of Faustus is a sensual, not a lofty, continued a favorite. Though there is in ambition. A feeling of curiosity and wonder the play much rant and fustian, still it has is excited by his necromancy and his strange passages of great beauty and wild grandeur, compact with Lucifer, but we do not fairly and the versification justifies the compliment sympathize till all his disguises are stripped afterward paid by Ben Jonson in the words off and his meretricious splendor is succeed"Marlow's mighty line." His finely mod- ed by horror and despair. Then, when he ulated and varied blank verse, observable stands on the brink of everlasting ruin, waiteven in this early play, is one of his most ing for the fatal moment, imploring yet discharacteristic features. The success of Tam- trusting repentance, a scene of enchaining berlaine induced Marlow to commence the interest, fervid passion and overwhelming profession of an actor, but he was soon in- pathos carries captive the sternest heart capacitated for the stage by accidentally and proclaims the full triumph of the breaking his leg. tragic poet. Marlow's second play, The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, exhibits a far wider range of dramatic power than his first. The hero studies necromancy, and makes a solemn disposal of his soul to Lucifer on condition of having a familiar spirit at his command and unlimited enjoyment for twenty-four years, during which period Faustus visits Before 1593, Marlow produced three other dramas, the Jew of Malta, the Massacre of Paris, and an historical play, Edward the Second. The last of these is a noble draina and contains a number of ably-drawn characters and splendid scenes. His life was as wild and irregular as were his writings. He was even accused of atheistical opinions, but there is no trace of this in his plays. He came to an early and singularly unhappy end. He was attached to a lady who favored another lover, and, having found them in company together, in a frenzy of rage he attempted to stab the man with his dagger. His antagonist seized him by the wrist and turned the dagger so that it entered Marlow's own head in such a manner that, notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be resorted to, he shortly after died of his wounds. The last words of Greene's address to him a year or two before are somewhat ominous: "Refuse not, with me, till this last point of extremity; for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited." Marlow's fatal conflict is supposed to have taken place at Deptford, as he was buried there on the 1st of June, 1593. was the son of James Knowles, who enjoyed in his day considerable reputation as a teacher of elocution and was the author of a dietionary of the English language. The son was born at Cork, in Ireland, in 1784. When he was eight years old, his parents moved to London, where he received a good education. Very naturally, he turned to the stage, and made his first appearance as an actor in Dublin. At no time did he excel in the histrionic art. He became, like his father, a teacher of elocution, especially in Belfast and Glasgow, and began to write plays, which his intimate knowledge of the stage enabled him to make very effective. First among these was Caius Gracchus, in 1815. It gave, though well received, no earnest of his great success in Virginius, which appeared in 1820. Of his thirteen. plays, this was not only the best, but far surpassed all the others. Among these were THI HIS lady, a daughter of William Inge-eida in 1840. He also wrote a novel enThe Hunchback in 1832 and John of Prolow, was born at Ipswich, England, in 1830, and is known as both a story-teller and a poet. She wrote a volume of stories (Tales of Orris) which was published in 1860. This was followed by The Round of Days, a poem, and later by A Story of Doom and a novel entitled Off the Skelligs. The work-or, rather, poetical conceit--by which she is best known is The Song of Seven, depicting the joys and sorrows which. are encountered in our journey through life at periods of seven years' interval. Later, Miss Ingelow wrote a volume entitled Studies for Stories. ABRAHAM MILLS, A. M. JEAN INGELOW. titled George Lovell (1845). In 1852, after many "compunctious visitings of conscience," became a Baptist preacher and a religious he abandoned the stage and playwriting and dinal Wiseman in a paper called The Idol polemic. He answered the writings of CarDemolished by its own Priest. He died in still 1862, at Broadstairs. Some of his plays appear upon the stage, although their literary merit is not great. OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW LIMITED. THE power of our Supreme Court is great and its sphere is vast, but there are limits to its power and its sphere. According to the words of the Constitution, "the judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under the Constitution, the laws of the United States and treaties," but it by no means follows that the interpretation of the Constitution which may be incident to the trial of these "cases is final. Of course, the judgment in the "case" actually pending is final, as the settlement of a controversy, for weal or woe to the litigating parties, but as a precedent it is not final even in the Supreme Court itself. When cited afterward, it will be regarded with respect as an interpretation of the Constitution, and, if nothing appears against it, of controlling authority; but at any day, in any litigation, at the trial of any case," it will be within the unquestionable competency of the court to review its own decision, so far as it establishes any interpretation of the Constitution. But if the court itself be not constrained by its own precedents, how can the co-ordinate branches of the government, who are respectively under oath to support the Constitution, and who, like the court itself, may be called within their respective spheres incidentally to interpret the Constitution, be constrained by them? In both instances the power to interpret the Constitution is simply incident to other principal duties, as the trial of "cases," the making of laws or the administration of government, and it seems as plainly incident to a "case' of legislation or of administration as to one of the "cases" of litigation. And on this view I shall act with entire confidence under the oath which I have taken. For myself, let me say that I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect, but I am too familiar with the history of judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a full share of human frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanction. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment. It was a judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave, which arrested the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles and sent him in bonds from Judea to Rome, which in the name of the old religion adjudged the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death in all its most dreadful forms, and which afterward, in the name of the new religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun. It was a judicial tribunal which in France during the long reign of her monarchs lent. itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief Reign of Terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessary of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry VIII., from the unjust divorce of his queen to the beheading of Sir Thomas More, which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley and John Rogers, which after elaborate argument upheld the fatal tyranny | statute. Of course the judgments of courts are of binding authority upon inferior tribunals and their own executive officers whose virtue does not prompt them to resign rather than aid in the execution of an unjust mandate. Over all citizens, whether in public or private station, they will naturally exert, as precedents, a commanding influence: this I admit. But no man who is not lost to self-respect and ready to abandon that manhood which is shown in the Heaven-directed countenance will voluntarily aid in enforcing a judgment which in his conscience he believes to be wrong. Surely he will not hesitate to "obey God rather than man" and calmly and calmly abide the perils which he may provoke. Not lightly, not rashly, will he take the grave responsibility of open dissent; but if the occasion requires, he will not fail. Pains and penalties may be endured, but wrong must not be done. "I cannot obey, but I can suffer," was the exclamation of the author of Pilgrim's Progress when imprisoned for disobedience to an earthly Better suffer injustice than to The whole dogma of passive obedience must be rejected, in whatever guise it may assume and under whatever alias it may skulk, whether in the tyrannical usurpations of king, Parliament or judicial tribunal. The rights of the civil power are limited; there are things beyond its province; there are matters out of its control: there are cases in which the faithful citizen may say-ay, must say "I will not obey." No man now responds to the words of Shakespeare: "If a king bid a man be a villain, he is bound, by the indenture of his oath, to be one." Nor will any prudent reasoner who duly considers the rights of conscience claim for any earthly magistrate or tribunal, howsoever styled, a power which in this age civilization and liberty the loftiest monarch of a Christian throne, wearing on his brow "the round and top of sovereignty," dare not assert. CL. ARLES SUMNER. THACKERAY. of WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY-so named after his grandfather-shares with Charles Dickens the highest place among the novelists of his time, and has, in the opinion of many of the best critics, no superior in his art within the entire range of English literature. Scholarship-or, rather, scholarly and literary tastes-were his by inheritance; he came of a family of schoolmasters and clergymen. His father, Richmond Thackeray, held a post in the civil service of India, and the son, William, was born at Calcutta in 1811, about one year before Dickens; so | plush-a caustic Malaprop who read and they entered upon their illustrious careers analyzed books-when Michael Angelo Titpassibus æquis. marsh appeared upon the scene and eclipsed the glories of Yellowplush. In 1836 he established, with his stepfather, Major Smyth, a newspaper called The Constitutional and Public Ledger; it was very liberal, but after less than a year of life it was abandoned. Thackeray's father died in 1815, but his mother and himself remained for a short time in India. Fearing, however, the effect of the climate on the boy's health, his mother sent him to England in 1817, and soon after she married Major Carmichael Smyth, who was always a kind guardian of her son. On his way to England the ship landed at St. Helena, where the great Napoleon was then in exile. The boy saw the fallen warrior, and his youth- | ful fancy depicted him as an ogre, for a negro whom he met told him that " Bonaparte ate three sheep every day and all the children he could lay his hands on." In 1822 he was entered at the Charter-House school, the peculiar and interesting life of which he has so often described under the name of "Grayfriars." In 1828 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was associated with Tennyson. He did not remain long enough to take his degree, but while there, in 1829, he edited a little paper called The Snob, the germ of his later contributions to Punch, collected and published afterward in The Book of Snobs. In 1831 he went to Weimar. As a young man with comfortable means, he enjoyed himself; and, thinking he discerned in himself a talent for drawing, he began to make caricatures and sketches after the manner of Hogarth. Later he went to Rome. On his return to England he began to write, and his earliest pieces are contributions to Fraser's Magazine. The vein of caricature in art was merged into satire and ridicule from the pen, and people had hardly begun to inquire who was the author of the extravaganzas of Charles Yellow About this time Thackeray married Miss Shaw, with the promise of a very happy life, soon, alas! to be marred by the mental condition of his wife. With the failing of his paper and other unfortunate speculations, his snug little fortune of twenty thousand pounds had melted away, and he had to depend upon his exertions for a livelihood. He was always very fond of Paris, crossing over whenever he could, living in the Latin Quarter, among the students, a somewhat Bohemian life. He now began to write in earnest and with a purpose. Between the years 1837 and 1840 he wrote Stubbs's Calendar; Catherine, by Ikey Solomons, Esq.; The Shabby-Genteel Story, which was left unfinished at the ninth chapter. In 1840 appeared, in the form of sketches from Fraser's Magazine, The Paris Sketch-Book ; The Great Hoggarty Diamond appeared in the numbers of Fraser's Magazine from September to December. These were speedily followed by Fitz-Boodle's Confessions, The Irish Sketch-Book, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and in 1844 he issued his papers From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, the result of a free pass-" a round-ticket "—presented to him by the company. In 1846 appeared Mrs. Perkin's Ball. Had Thackeray done nothing more than the works thus tabularly enumerated, he |