he receives the false news of his fallen daughter’s death:  “Dead? my last and best peace go with her!”—­those which he murmurs to himself on seeing her again after seventeen years of estrangement:  “The mother’s own face, I ha’ not forgot that”—­prepare the way for the admirable final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, and his ostentation of obduracy relaxes into tenderness and tears.  “Dost thou beg for him, thou precious man’s meat, thou? has he not beaten thee, kicked thee, trod on thee? and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? has he not pawned thee to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust? yet wouldst have me save him?—­What, dost thou hold him? let go his hand:  if thou dost not forsake him, a father’s everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads!” The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection of exquisite accuracy in expression which must be recognized at once and remembered forever by any competent reader of this scene is the highest quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here displayed at its highest:  the more poetic or romantic quality of his genius had already begun to fade out when this second part of his finest poem was written.  Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically effective:  but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to this comparatively unworthy consideration:  the pure, high-minded, noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate affection was so simply and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.

But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of “Twelfth Night” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the demerits of the two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross, so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest, was Thomas Heywood.  In style and versification the patriotic and anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of “The Whore of Babylon” is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited and fluent, with