nglish prose. Had Mr. Matthew Arnold,
instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and
eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise,
or had he condescended to glance over Daniel's compact and admirable
"Defence of Rhyme," he would have found in writers of the despised
Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent
qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our
literature by writers of the age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very
first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at
the opening of Dekker's pamphlet is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the
gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Moliere, and the
humors of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of Dickens. The
lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in
consequence of her obsequious husband's alleged neglect, "no more like
the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster"; the description of the
poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and
trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening
supper and the preliminary feast of scandal--are full of such bright and
rich humor as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly.
It is of Shakespeare again that we are reminded in the next chapter, by
the description of the equipage to which the husband of "a woman that
hath a charge of children" is reduced when he has to ride to the assizes
in sorrier plight than Petruchio rode in to his wedding; the details
remind us also of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity of their
industrious realism: but the scene on his return reminds us rather of
Thackeray at the best of his bitterest mood--the terrible painter of
Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. "The humor of a woman that
marries her inferior by birth" deals with more serious matters in a
style not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of the time--Shakespeare's
always excepted--has a scene in it of richer and more original humor
than brightens the narrative which relates the woes of the husband
who invites his friends to dinner and finds everything under lock and
key. Hardly in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so masterly
as here--so vivid and so vigorous in its life-like ease and spontaneity.
But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the
description of some fresh "humor," which would not deser