rooted in self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable place among the immortal writers of his age.  But this gift had been so absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by circumstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his writings.  Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author’s infirmity of hand.  From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately developed.  His “pleasant Comedie of ‘The Gentle Craft,’” first printed three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if rather thin-spun and slight of structure:  but the more serious and romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in ostentation and repetition of jocose catch-words after the fashion of mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond all reason.  In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no signs of the author’s higher poetic abilities:  the style is pure and sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not required by the subject:  but in the other play of Dekker’s which bears the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his ingrained faults of levity and laziness.  The famous passage in which Webster couples together the names of “Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood,” seems explicable when we compare the style of “Old Fortunatus” with the style of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  Dekker had as much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely 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