with Ford, and the second play in which he took
part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on
those other three poets. The next play which bears his name alone was
published five years later than the political or historical sketch or
study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a
tolerable if not a creditable piece of work. It is difficult to abstain
from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as
that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, "If this be not
a good Play, the Devil is in it." A worse has seldom discredited the
name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden's delectable
tragedy of "Amboyna," Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," Pope's
elegant comedy of "Three Hours after Marriage," are scarcely more
unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious
in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that
it must have been written against time in a debtor's prison, under the
influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would
have flung at the tapster's head with an accompaniment of such language
as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive
provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law.
I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of
this play I have never come across in all the range of that
excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer
was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller
relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general
workmanship.[1]

[Footnote 1: As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I
give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy
play:

Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find
A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined
To any bendings: lest his youthful brows
Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs
With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste
Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste,
The body feels consumption: good or bad kings
Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs.
Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil
Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.

The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable
for its virile force and honied