Of all English poets, if not of all poets on, record, Dekker is perhaps the most difficult to classify.  The grace and delicacy, the sweetness and spontaneity of his genius are not more obvious and undeniable than the many defects which impair and the crowning deficiency which degrades it.  As long, but so long only, as a man retains some due degree of self-respect and respect for the art he serves or the business he follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of respect for any other obligation in the world.  Francois Villon, compared with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson:  he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first class of writers for all time.  If not in that class, yet high in the class immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among the masters of creative literature.  For he was by nature at once a singer and a maker:  he had the gift of native music and the birthright of inborn invention.  His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets.  For gentle grace of inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best by Shakespeare’s self alone.  No such combination or alternation of such admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or sublime compeers.  And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any other quality of kindred genius.

And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure.  There is a pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur, in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art, the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet.  For, as Lamb says, Dekker “had poetry enough for anything”; at all events, for anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and an exquisite simplicity of expression.  With the one great gift of seriousness, of noble ambition, of self-confidence