ar, but the strangely
composite fashion of writing of the time makes them appear in differing
measures. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is one of those innumerable and yet
singular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so much
delighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste,--pieces in which a plot
or underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a mere
picture of the life, generally the lower middle-class life of the time, is
united with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plot
of a romantic kind, in which noble and royal 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 the
sympathetic handling of Griselda's character (the one of all others to
appeal to Dekker) mark his work. In all the other plays the same notes
appear, and there is no doubt that Mr. Swinburne is wholly right in
singling out from _The Witch of Edmonton_ the feminine characters of Susan,
Winifred, and the witch herself, as showing Dekker's unmatched command of
the colours in which to paint womanhood. In the great debate as to the
authorship of _The Virgin Martyr_, everything is so much conjecture that it
is hard to pronounce authoritatively. Gifford's cool assumption