works
themselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. It is,
therefore, all the more necessary to be candid in criticism where criticism
seems to be required.

As to the last of our good company, there is fortunately very little risk
of difference of opinion. A hundred years ago Thomas Dekker was probably
little more than a name to all but professed students of Elizabethan
literature, and he waited longer than any of his fellows for due
recognition by presentation of his work in a complete form. It was not
until the year 1873 that his plays were collected; it was not till eleven
years later that his prose works had the same honour. Yet, since attention
was directed to Dekker in any way, the best authorities have been unanimous
in his praise. Lamb's famous outburst of enthusiasm, that he had "poetry
enough for anything," has been soberly endorsed by two full generations of
the best judges, and whatever differences of detail there may be as to his
work, it is becoming more and more the received, and correctly-received
opinion, that, as his collaborator Webster came nearest to Shakespere in
universalising certain types in the severer tragedy, so Dekker has the same
honour on the gently pathetic side. Yet this great honour is done to one of
the most shadowy personalities in literature. We have four goodly volumes
of his plays and five of his other works; yet of Thomas Dekker, the man, we
know absolutely less than of any one of his shadowy fellows. We do not know
when he 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;"