A History of English Literature

s are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been already

eat length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may be presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of

y, who was seven years his senior. Their first child, Susannah, was baptized six months later. He is said to have left Stratford for London in 1585, or thereabouts, and to have connected himself at once with the theatre, first in humble and then in more important positions. But all this is mist and myth. He is transparently referred to by Robert Greene in the summer or autumn of 1592, and the terms of the reference prove his prosperity. The same passage brought out a complimentary reference to Shakespere's intellectual and moral character from Chettle, Greene's editor. He published Venus and Adonis in 1593, and Lucrece next year. His plays now began to appear rapidly, and brought him money enough to buy, in 1597, the house of New Place at Stratford, and to e

antly repeated assertion that England long misunderstood or neglected Shakespere, and that foreign aid, chiefly German (though some include Voltaire!), was required to make her discover him. A very short way is possible with this absurdity. It would be difficult to name any men more representative of cultivated literary opinion and accomplishment in the six generations (taking a generation at the third of a century) which passed between Shakespere's death and the battle of Waterloo (since when English admiration of Shakespere will hardly be denied), than Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their lives overlapped each other considerably, so that no period is left uncovered. They were all typical men of letters, each of his own time, and four at least of them were literary dictators. Now, Ben Jonson's estimate of Shakespere in prose and verse is on record in more places than one, and is as authentic as the silly stories of his envy are myt

mely luscious, not to say voluptuous, poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, which has its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, in numerous passages of Spenser, and in the Hero and Leander of Marlowe, but which was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said, with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number of Elizabethan writers. There are extant mere adespota, and mere "minor poems" (such as the pretty "Britain's Ida," which used to be printed as Spenser's, and which some critics have rather rashly given to Phineas Fletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at other times. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one hand, any deliberate intention of executing a tour de force in the composition of these poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberate rejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears to h

o them. When they are freed from this torture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about them except the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidently addressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at the time, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man; others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry, suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitants of the passion of love-which are only commonplaces as death and life are commonplace-form their motives. For my part I am unable to find the slightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questions whether the Mr. W. H. of the dedication was th

quality of subject. "What that quality of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness an

warrior, famo

and victories

book of hono

t forgot for wh

ssions of sweet

emembrance of

ud full sail of

rize of all too

e me if t

e sonnet whic

chronicle of

tions of the

aking beauti

dies dead and l

magnificent q

o the marriag

iments. Lov

when it alt

h the remove

alth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of the circumstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable. And if the poet's object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it with or even without any special relation to his own actual feelings for any actual person (a hypothesis which human nature i

rticular situation. This unique quality is uniquely illustrated in his plays. The exact order of their composition is entirely unknown, and the attempts which have been made to arrange it into periods, much more to rank play after play in regular sequence, are obvious failures, and are discredited not merely by the inadequate means-such as counting syllables and attempting to classify the cadence of lines-resorted to in order to effect them, but by the hopeless discrepancy between the results of different investigators and of the same investigator at different times. We know indeed pretty certainly that Romeo and Juliet was an early play, and Cymbeline a late one, with other general facts of the same kind. We know pretty certainly that the Henry the Sixth series was based on a previous series on the same subject in which Shakespere not improbably had a hand; that King John and The Taming of the Shrew had in the same way first draught

any French naturalist of the latest school has charged the author of Pericles, and Love's Labour Lost, and Henry IV., with that pruderie bête of which they accuse Scott. But he never makes those forms of vice which most trouble and corrupt society triumphant; he never diverges into the morbid pathology of the amatory passion, and above all, and most remarkably of all, though I think least remarked, he never makes his personages show the singular toleration of the most despicable immorality which almost all his dramatic contemporaries exhibit. One is constantly astonished at the end of an Elizabethan play, when, after vice has been duly baffled or punished, and virtue rewarded (for they all more or less follow that rule), reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries follow, to observe the complacency with which husbands who have sold their wives' favours, wives who have been at the command of the first comer or the highest bidder, mix cheek by jowl, and apparently unrebuked, with the modest maidens, the virtuous matrons, the faithful lovers of the piece. Shakespere never does this. Mrs. Quickly is indeed at one time the confidante of Anne Fenton, and at another the complaisant hostess of Doll Tear-sheet, but not in the same play. We do not find Marina's master and mistress rewarded, as they would very likely have been by Fletcher or Middleton, with comfortable if not prominent posts at the court of Pericles, or the Government-house of Mytilene. The ugly and artistically unmanageable situation of the husband who trades in his wife's honour simply does not occur in all the wide license and variety of Shakespere's forty plays. He is in his own sense liberal as the most easy going can demand, but he never mixes vice and virtue. Yet again, while practising this singu

ile department of literature; but he shares them as infinitely the largest shareholder. It is difficult to think of any other poet (for with Homer we are deprived of the opportunity of comparison) who was so completely able to meet any one of his contemporaries on that contemporary's own terms in natural gift. I say natural gift because, though it is quite evident that Shakespere was a man of no small reading, his deficiencies in general education are too constantly recorded by tradition, and rendered too probable by internal evidence, to be ignored or denied by any impartial critic. But it is

s only not bad as art, while most, if not all of it, was originally produced with a minimum of artistic consciousness and design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed-theories involving the construction of perhaps as much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these three I think that he constantly had, and that he was completely successful in achieving them. The first was to tell in every play a dramatically complete story; the second was to work that story out by the means of purely human and probable characters; and the third was to give such form and ornaments to the working out as might please the playgoers of his day. In pursuing the first two he was the poet or dramatist of all time. In pursuing the third he was the intelligent playwright. But (and here is the source of the common error) it by no means follows that his attention, and his successful attention, to his third purpose in any way interferes with, or degrades, his excellence as a pursuer of the first two. In the first place, it can escape no careful student that the merely playwright part of Shakespere's work is (as is the case with no other dramatic author whatever) singularly separable. No generation since his death has had the slightest difficulty in adapting by far the greater part of his plays to

est in it, experienced in life and with an interest in that, asserts that Caliban and Trinculo interfere with his enjoyment of Ferdinand and Miranda; that the almost tragedy of Hero is marred for him by the comedy of Beatrice and the farce of Dogberry; that he would have preferred A Midsummer Night's Dream without the tedious brief effort of Quince and his companions; that the solemnity and passion of Hamlet and Macbeth cause in him a revulsion against the porter and the gravedigger; that the Fool and Edgar are out of place in Lear,-it is impossible to prove to him by the methods of any Euclid or of any Aldrich that he is wrong. The thing is essentially, if not wholly, a matter of taste. It is possible, indeed, to point out, as in the case of the Unities, that the o

e mysterious way, under and into that "species of eternity" which transforms all the great works of art, which at once prevents them from being mere copies of Nature, and excuses whatever there is of Nature in them that is not beautiful or noble. If this touch is wanting anywhere (and it is wanting very seldom), that, I take it, is the best, indeed the only, sign that that passage is not Shakespere's,-that he had either made use of some other man's work, or that some other man had made use of his. If such passages were of more frequent occurrence, this argument might be called a circular one. But the proportion of such passages as I at least should exclude is so small, and the difference between them and the rest is so marked, that no improper begging of the question can be justly charged. The plays in the Globe edition contain just a thousand closely-printed

ists. His earliest known, and probably much of his unknown work coincides with the period of tentative; and his latest work overlaps very much of that period of ripe and somewhat over-ripe performance, at the head of which it has here been thought good to set Beaumont and Fletcher. But there is a group of four notable persons who appear to have especial rights to be classed with him, if not in greatness, yet in character of work, and in the influences which played on that work. They all, like him, took an independent part in the marvellous wit-combat of the last decade of Elizabeth, and they all like him survived, though for different lengths of time, to set an example to the thir

, and it established Jonson's reputation, though there is no reasonable doubt that he had written other things. His complicated associations and quarrels with Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and others, have occupied the time of a considerable number of persons; they lie quite beyond our subject, and it may be observed without presumption that their direct connection, even with the literary work (The Poetaster, Satiromastix, and the rest) which is usually linked to them, will be better established when critics have left off being uncertain whether A was B, or B, C. Even the most famous story of all (the disgrace of Jonson with others for Eastward Ho! as a libel against the Scots, for which he was imprisoned, and, being threatened with mutilation, was by his Roman mother supplied with poison), though told by himself, does not rest on any external evidence. What is certain is that Jonson was in great and greater request, both as a writer of masks and other divertissements for the Court, and as a head and chief of literary conviviality at the "Mermaid," and other famous taverns. Here, as he grew older, there grew up round him that "Tribe of Ben," or admiring clique of young literary men, which included almost all the most remarkable poets, except Milton, of the late Jacobean and early Caroline period, and which helped to spread his fame for at least two generations, and (by Waller's influence on Saint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who was introduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as a worker in the English vernacular. At last he was made Poet Laureate, and in 1618 he took a journey to Scotland, and

mined much of the course of English poetry for many years, and retained a great name even in the comparative eclipse of the "Giant Race" after the Restoration. It was only when the study of Shakespere became a favourite subject with persons of more industry than intelligence in the early eighteenth century, that a singular fabric of myth grew up round Ben Jonson. He was pictured as an incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitablen

luminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, three only-Every Man in his Humour, The Alchemist, and the charming fragment of The Sad Shepherd-can be praised as wholes. His lovely Masques are probably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation. His noble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. His minor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers in literature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet his merits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save The Sad Shepherd) "tender," and still more rarely "sublime," he yet, in words much better applied to him t

o each her p

agnifice

e only with

and flower of

this sable

eprived of this, me jud

observed here that it is saturated with the same literary flavour which pervades all his work. None of his dramatic fellows wrote anything that can compare to it, just as none of them wrote anything that surpasses the songs and snatches in his plays, and the best things in his miscellaneous works. The one title which no competent criticism has ever grudged

is a great contrast, being, as even the doughty Gifford admits, distinctly uninteresting as a whole, despite numerous fine passages. Perhaps a little of its want of attraction must be set down to a pestilent habit of Jonson's, which he had at one time thought of applying to Every Man in his Humour, the habit of giving foreign, chiefly Italian, appellations to his characters, describing, and as it were labelling them-Deliro, Macilente, and the like. This gives an air of unreality, a figurehead and type character. Cynthia's Revels has the same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery of euphuism. With The Poetaster Jonson began to rise again. I think myself that the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be much better away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tedious if it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But in spite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of Sejanus and Jonson's later Roman play Catiline I think, I confess, better than the majority of critics appear to think. That they have any very intense tragic interest will, indeed, hardly be pretended, and the unfortunate but inevitable comparison with Coriolanus and Julius C?sar has done them great and very unjust harm. Less human than Shakespere's "godlike Romans" (who are as human as they are godlike), Jonson's are undoubtedly more Roman, and this, if it is not entirely an attraction, is in its way a merit. But it was not till after Sejanus that the full power of Jonson appeared. His three next plays, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, could not have been written by any one but himself, and, had they not been written, would have left a gap in English which nothing from any other literature could sup

e Alchemist was followed by Catiline, and Catiline by Bartholomew Fair, a play in which singularly vivid and minute pictures of manners, very amusing sketches of character, and some capital satire on the Puritans, do not entirely redeem a profusion of the coarsest possible language and incident. The Devil is an Ass comes next in time, and though no single character is the equal of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Bartholomew Fair, the play is even more amusing. The four last plays, The Staple of News, The Magnetic Lady, The New Inn, and The Tale of a Tub, which Jonson produced after long absence from the stage, were not successful, and were both unkindly and unjustly called by Dryden "Ben's dotages." As for the charming Sad Shepherd, it was never acted, and is now unfinished, though it is believed that the poet completed it. It stands midway as a pastoral Féeri

gin to study 'em

cure me. May

d be safe? a

shes, so I d

r Sejanus?

. 'Tis hard th

ed? What danger

eep or cough? Wh

head without

t holds up, an

nies? These n

ortune, yea, th

ivilege 'gainst

ay, no hour, w

ious and most

kind of cruelt

ion pleaseth.

f drunkards, w

plicity, all

tcht at. Nor i

son, or fo

ed; for 'tis

me little diff

s this? Prince

ng silent, by which his interlocutor Lepidu

w she is dead! of

bles? thistles,

ews? the mandra

till: but what c

ole earth sick

nce did fall o

wept for her!

ower, or any

h was made! In

r to put these

in no sort

very being

knots or buddin

e primrose a

ses blown: whe

d the Graces

wers and sweets

made their so

ile she lived!

thered the same

Erwash, Idel,

urn, and twen

Trent, shrunk thems

n, or other c

eaven, but all

ung so for h

e or sound to

smal pair, the

net! Hark! hark

lutters with he

shall hear

d Karoli

ivert thi

All I

e ?g. read

m young and

Death or L

eard they bo

o aim at h

ain, I have

th heat, as De

fear they

touch and me

ruin we

o be blown

nd, like wa

of lightnin

nflamèd sha

soon as Deat

's fires th

frost out of

His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in his later days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of English translators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of his portrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation of fame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as a translator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest, rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possible connection with the early despatch of English troupes of players to Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English poets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poetical fame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time, justice to

the way in which the characters speak of themselves, not as "I" but by their names in the third person, is also unmistakable. But All Fools is a much more noteworthy piece, and though Mr. Swinburne may have praised it rather highly, it would certainly take place in a collection of the score best comedies of the time not written by Shakespere. The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur d'Olive belong to the same school of humorous, not too pedantic comedy, and then we come to the strange series of Chapman's French tragedies, Bussy d'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France. These singular plays stand by themselves. Whether the strong influence which Marlowe exercised on Chapman led the later poet (who it must be remembered was not the younger) to continue The Massacre of Paris, or what other cause begat them, cannot now be asserted or even guessed without lost labour. A famous criticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps, to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence which Chapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the whole five are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models of what plays should be

praise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it is the most curious instance of a radically unpassionate nature, trying to lash itself into passion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried an even bolder flight in the same dialect-the continuation of Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander. In this attempt, either by sheer force of his sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "Dead Shepherd," his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast of the two parts. The Tears of Peace, which contains his finest work, is in honour of Prince Henry-a worthy work on a worthy subject, which was followed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besides some epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is the disastrous Andromeda Liberata, which unluckily celebrates the nuptials-stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts-of Frances

his occasional unfaithfulness (for a libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey-an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest substitute. With Chapman it is not alw

, we cannot imagine him for a moment composing a Volpone or an Alchemist-even a Bartholomew Fair; while he was equally, or still more, incapable of Jonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certain shapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did-an inability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapman must acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles, and his brow of fog." His long literary life, which must have exceeded half a century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it may be set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in the case of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to the imperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting his work,

hicket (whose d

iries and of f

human-thoug

such as lived

re of this go

rown her fanes w

alk; exspiring

reats for the

arrows, some of

s eat, paintin

transformed th

sters carried

ieces, and the

hade, to wail t

ring (since they

fault, in eager

ions, unicor

ounds lie licki

at the shroud,

gues, that did t

new the game wa

forced the bea

thicket; whose

lions, boars

lves, that hal

oars, and sound

rinceliest, and

fame to those

riders furious

they gave, in

alchions made th

en'd, and let

ad as it is, is n

change is here; t

ing made known t

tless spirit wo

dangerous a

ants? He wants

ife and body;

ant he means, a

rewarning? This

ith the dar

nce of Darkness

ied shadow) s

ion of the sp

, that by a

wer to raise him

ords and decen

et brain such

cheer it; now, t

of his free

eater light and

oracle. I l

stress fares,

ow holds on the

d lord. Methou

tter'd his per

countenance head

nt, as it would

hin against his

rlish silence th

ness! O, thou

music-footed h

out of crystal

tructive fire a

e drowsy and e

dead eyes in th

rince of shades

arted beams, who

arkness, and

blindest: ope

ed oracle, t

includes, wou

with it in thy

y still he stood,

fleet such fire, as

l petition, and w

burning ships might

pulse was then to b

n the Greeks; which t

of his spirit, th

that of itself wa

e Mars himself, so b

hades of a wood, a rag

es by a hill; abo

cean is enraged; hi

embled flames, set o

his bright helm abhor

he sphere of stars, to

f both the hosts co

ince after this he

before his death, wh

, and now prepared)

In meantime, his

er it; and he, still w

d bravest arm'd, there

o break through, but th

past all theirs, they

hat as a rock, excee

hoary sea, bears man

nd billows huge, belch

Hector's charge, nor stirr

suffice to exhibit Chapman'

he Godd

orning in her

st world; by wh

n'd me with at

putting on bot

nd curious, a

hat glittered

ld; and forth

ers, roused them

now no more

st, but straight

oddess had in

irits agreed;

all off, but

ife left. He w

ompany, and

arms, as little

teep'd in wine

hing by the c

ows plung'd in

igh in tumult

d and (quite

had given him

adder, forwar

very roof, f

int his head w

lved, let loose h

nd Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extreme inferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, like Tourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity and proportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection of Shakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued through Fletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the more artificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of the First Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at Jeronimo, but his own tragic construction and s

l slept, whilst I

dunces, pored

s, and still m

ed lamp oil,

ins, and still

eld converse

otus, and t

ate: still my

t I: first a

were mortal.

at brain buffets,

] together-still

twere corporea

ut whether 't

hot phi

actions all so

new not which

oted, read, obs

ooks, and still

ked and yawned,

now, he knew

Kis

r. This is supported by the curious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) were produced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirty years after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last dated appearances in literature, The Insatiate Countess, and Eastward Ho! That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for s?va indignatio, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his p

but in which (except in the famous Cornwall and Gloucester scene in Lear) Shakespere never indulged after his earliest days. The wicked tyrant's tongue is torn out, his murdered son's body is thrown down before him, and then the conspirators, standing round, gibe, curse, and rant at him for a couple of pages before they plunge their swords into his body. This goodly conclusion is led up to by a sufficient quantit

I never was a P

ared pate, th

Tyrian purple,

butterflies, th

ummer, that co

nsavoury breat

clapping, wit

rince. No, Luc

g, that dares do

mortal, but

n up with the f

ophants: who

e jostling

himself, mau

press his qui

n Jove's foo

ot affecti

wreathèd with

ent: this, Lu

mpire, every

worth h

han fashion, of Le Misanthrope and The Plain Dealer. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coarseness and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observed that both in The Fawn and The Malcontent there are disguised dukes-a fact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of Eastward Ho! we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that The Insatiate Countess is Marston's. His reputation would not lose much were it not. A fabliau-like underplot of the machinations of two light-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, but the main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except that she adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts lovers and induces their successors to assassinate them, is in the worst styl

was born, when he died, what he did other than writing in the certainly long space between the two unknown dates. In 1637 he was by his own words a man of threescore, which, as it has been justly remarked, may mean anything between fifty-five and seventy. He was in circumstances a complete contrast to his fellow-victim in Jonson's satire, Marston. Marston was apparently a gentleman born and bred, well connected, well educated, possessed of some property, able to make testamentary dispositions, and probably in the latter part of his life, when Dekker was still toiling at journalism of various kinds, a beneficed clergyman in country retirement. Dekker was, it is to be feared, what the arrogance of certain members of the literary profession has called, and calls, a gutter-journalist-a man who had no regular preparation for the literary career, and who never produced anything but hand-to-mouth work. Jonson went so far as to say that he was a "rogue;" but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not to be trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there was any but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly the opposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it is particularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote in collaboration, one invariable to

oyal personages, with, it may be, a dash of history, play their parts. The crowning instance of this is Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough; but there are scores and hundreds of others, and Dekker specially affects it. The Shoemaker's Holiday is principally distinguished by the directness and raciness of its citizen sketches. Satiromastix (the second title of which is "The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet") is Dekker's reply to The Poetaster, in which he endeavours to retort Jonson's own machinery upon him. With his customary disregard of congruity, however, he has mixed up the personages of Horace, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Tucca, not with a Roman setting, but with a purely romantic story of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, and the king's attempt upon the fidelity of Tyrrel's bride. This incongruous mixture gives one of the most charming scenes of his pen, the apparent poisoning of Celestina by her father to save her honour. But as Lamb himself candidly confessed, the effect of this in the original is marred, if not ruined, by the farcical surroundings, and the more farcical upshot of the scene itself,-the poisoning being, like Juliet's, a mere trick, though very differently fortuned. In Patient Grissil the two exquisite songs, "Art thou poor" and "Golden slumbers kiss thine eyes," and

and distinctly outlined plot. Old Fortunatus tells the well-known story of the wishing cap and purse, with a kind of addition showing how these fare in the hands of Fortunatus's sons, and with a wild intermixture (according to the luckless habit above noted) of kings and lords, and pseudo-historical incidents. No example of the kind is more chaotic in movement and action. But the interlude of Fortune with which it

urse on: your cri

sacred roundu

sweet than movin

our celestial

, which then leap

asants dance and

this Globe, t

d world at our

rtune's ball whe

strike it up

ate I Empero

rn it: at which

multitude: cur

ble Princes fro

brows with glit

read on necks

emi-gods they h

ariots to t

t with wonde

very tongue, lo

their own greatne

their pride, an

bbles, with

cowards into h

e spirited sol

d all bare, whi

ne'er durst view

ot's cap on

ut of doors, cl

n thousand i

ken colours:

asses I mak

rt, to see t

beasts with s

does, and whe

les to hear some

adoration cr

ay to-morrow th

the Princess

l the King I'

adow, will I

e goes bare, a

the rich man

morrow virtu

gars shall be

rrow's time, no

nce: bear that

crude and undigested, but the ill-matured pow

ain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it, admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason for preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out of Shakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in her unreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman-not as conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail at women, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days is sometimes coarser than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise her nature,