before them with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of gesture.  His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to reproduce:  but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off.[1] Chettle and Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of them something of their colleague’s finer qualities; but the best scenes in the play remind me rather of Dekker’s best early work than of “Robert, Earl of Huntington” or of “Englishmen for My Money.”  So much has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant self-excuse.  “Italy,” says an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying and impudent gull, “Italy infects you not, but your own diseased spirits.  Italy?  Out, you froth, you scum! because your soul is mud, and that you have breathed in Italy, you’ll say Italy has denied you:  away, you boar:  thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest country in the world.”

[Footnote 1:  I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens.  The original reads: 

   So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn,
   Shew the care-pined hearts that sue to them.

The word Shew is an obvious misprint—­but more probably, I venture to think, for the word Shun than for the word Fly, which is substituted by Mr. Collier and accepted by Dr. Grosart.]

There are many traces of moral or spiritual weakness and infirmity in the writings of Dekker and the scattered records or indications of his unprosperous though not unlaborious career:  but there are manifest and manifold signs of an honest and earnest regard for justice and fair dealing, as well as of an inexhaustible compassion for suffering, an indestructible persistency of pity, which found characteristic expression in the most celebrated of his plays.  There is a great gulf between it and the first of Victor Hugo’s tragedies:  yet the instinct of either poet is the same, as surely as their common motive is the redemption of a fallen woman by the influence of twin-born love and shame.  Of all Dekker’s works, “The Honest Whore” comes nearest to some reasonable degree of unity and harmony in conception and construction; his besetting vice of reckless and sluttish incoherence has here done less than usual to deform the proportions and deface the impression of his design.  Indeed, the connection of the two serious plots in the first part is a rare example of dexterous and happy simplicity in composition: