ely and noble
realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride
of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic
loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he
was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels
in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the
world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these
occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to
such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos
which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of
Shakespeare's, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in
comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names
of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or
most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common
with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of
Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just
when he said of the "frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he talks
pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they." The word
"almost" should be supplanted by the word "fully"; and the criticism
would then be no less adequate than apt. Sidney himself might have
applauded the verses which clothe with living music a passion as fervent
and as fiery a fancy as his own. Not even in the rapturous melodies of
that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable
names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a passage
more enchanting than this:

Thou art a traitor to that white and red
Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne)
Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead,
This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none.
Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be
In love with nothing but deformity.
O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes
Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never
Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax,
Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1]
Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity;
Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's,
For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface,
But thine's eternal: O Deformity,
Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne's,
For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have,
But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.

[Footnote 1: As even Lamb allowed the meaningless an