nature which concludes the torrent of recrimination, would have won some word of honorable recognition from any but the most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans.  That Dekker was unable to hold his own against Jonson when it came to sheer hard hitting—­that on the ground or platform of personal satire he was as a light-weight pitted against a heavy-weight—­is of course too plain, from the very first round, to require any further demonstration.  But it is not less plain that in delicacy and simplicity and sweetness of inspiration the poet who could write the scene in which the bride takes poison (as she believes) from the hand of her father, in presence of her bridegroom, as a refuge from the passion of the king, was as far above Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster qualities of intellect or genius.  This most lovely scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for passion distilled in melody, is comparable only with higher work, of rarer composition and poetry more pure, than Jonson’s:  it is a very treasure-house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and sweet as flowers.  When Dekker writes like this, then truly we seem to see his right hand in the left hand of Shakespeare.

To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker amicably associated in the composition of a joint poem or pageant within the space of a year from the publication of so violent a retort by the latter to so vehement an attack by the former must amuse if it does not astonish the reader least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness to quarrel and the boyish readiness to shake hands which would seem to be implied in so startling a change of relations.  In all the huge, costly, wearisome, barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial which welcomed into London the Solomon of Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to follow the ponderous elaboration of report drawn up by these reconciled enemies will remark the solid and sedate merit of Jonson’s best couplets with less pleasure than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker’s lyric notes.  Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson’s songs for their finish of style and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to place him in the first class—­much less, in the front rank—­of lyric poets.  He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron; but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as Blake or Shelley.  Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this same year of the accession of James—­“Patient Grissel”; a romantic tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone