is very best work that it really does him justice--that it
adequately represents the fulness of his unquestionable powers. And yet
it is certain that Lamb was not less right than usual when he said that
Dekker "had poetry enough for anything." But he had not constructive
power enough for the trade of a playwright--the trade in which he spent
so many weary years of ill-requited labor. This comedy in which we first
find him associated with Middleton is well written and well contrived,
and fairly diverting--especially to an idle or an uncritical reader:
though even such an one may suspect that the heroine here represented as
a virginal virago must have been in fact rather like Dr. Johnson's fair
friend Bet Flint; of whom the Great Lexicographer "used to say that she
was generally slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief" (Boswell,
May 8, 1781). The parallel would have been more nearly complete if Moll
Cutpurse "had written her own Life in verse," and brought it to Selden
or Bishop Hall with a request that he would furnish her with a preface
to it.

The plays of Middleton are not so properly divisible into tragic and
comic as into realistic and romantic--into plays of which the mainspring
is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the
mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical. Two only of the former
class remain to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" and "A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside." There is very good stuff in the plot or groundwork
of the former, but the workmanship is hardly worthy of the material, Mr.
Bullen ingeniously and plausibly suggests the partnership of Shirley in
this play: but the conception of the character in which he discerns a
likeness to the touch of the lesser dramatist is happier and more
original than such a comparison would indicate. The young stepmother
whose affectation of selfish levity and grasping craft is really
designed to cure her husband of his infatuation, and to reconcile him
with the son who regards her as his worst enemy, is a figure equally
novel, effective, and attractive. The honest shopkeeper and his shrewish
wife may remind us again of Dickens by their points of likeness to Mr.
and Mrs. Snagsby; though the reformation of the mercer's jealous vixen
is brought about by more humorous and less tragical means than the
repentance of the law-stationer's "little woman." George the apprentice,
through whose wit and energy this happy consummation becomes possib