gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation vacuous and vehement.  An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the “Persae”; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pass by him, remains alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime perfection.  Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing.  The Empress of Babylon is but a poor slipshod ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic beadle:  “non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e passa.”

Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on those other three poets.  The next play which bears his name alone was published five years later than the political or historical sketch or study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a tolerable if not a creditable piece of work.  It is difficult to abstain from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, “If this be not a good Play, the Devil is in it.”  A worse has seldom discredited the name of any man with a spark of genius in him.  Dryden’s delectable tragedy of “Amboyna,” Lee’s remarkable tragicomedy of “Gloriana,” Pope’s elegant comedy of “Three Hours after Marriage,” are scarcely more unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious in their headlong and unabashed incompetence.  Charity would suggest that it must have been written against time in a debtor’s prison, under the influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would have flung at the tapster’s head with an accompaniment of such language as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law.  I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of this play I have never come across in all the range of that excruciating experience.  The rare and faint indications that the writer was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general workmanship.[1]

[Footnote 1:  As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy play: 

   Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find
   A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined
   To any bendings:  lest his youthful brows
   Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs
   With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste
   Of things most sensual:  if the heart once waste,
   The body feels consumption:  good or bad kings
   Breed subjects like them:  clear streams flow from clear springs. 
   Turn therefore Naples to a puddle:  with a civil
   Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.