of the
sweet-tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of
Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something
of his humor: but if this were all we had of him we should know
comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find
most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is
more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories
or his legendary complications and variations on the antique. The famous
and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be
forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading "The Four
Prentices of London." Externally the most extravagant and grotesque of
dramatic poems, this eccentric tragicomedy of chivalrous adventure is
full of poetic as well as fantastic interest. There is really something
of discrimination in the roughly and readily sketched characters of the
four crusading brothers: the youngest especially is a life-like model of
restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when incarnate in a
hot-headed English boy; unlike even in its likeness to the same type as
embodied in a French youngster such as the immortal d'Artagnan. Justice
has been done by Lamb, and consequently as well as subsequently by later
criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which breaks out by flashes
in this quixotic romance of the City, with its serio-comic ideal of
crusading counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowledge been
observed that in the scene "where they toss their pikes so," which
aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own
prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood,
the future object of Dryden's ignorant and pointless insult, anticipated
with absolute exactitude the style of Dryden's own tragic blusterers
when most busily bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual
challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean epigram.[1]

[Footnote 1: Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue
in "Tyrannic Love" or "The Conquest of Granada":

"Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play?
Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey."

"Rapier and pike this combat shall decide:
Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride."

"I'll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be,
And feign to do my cunning after me."

This will remind the reader not so much of the "Rehearsal" as of
Butler's infinitely superior