energy and humor.  That rushing wind of satire, that storm of resonant invective, that inexhaustible volubility of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle.  This “News from Hell, brought by the Devil’s Carrier,” and containing “The Devil’s Answer to Pierce Penniless,” might have miscarried by the way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we could have been content to spare of Dekker’s incompetence to deal with a subject which he was curiously fond of handling in earnest and in jest.  He seems indeed to have fancied himself, if not something of a Dante, something at least of a Quevedo; but his terrors are merely tedious, and his painted devils would not terrify a babe.  In this tract, however, there are now and then some fugitive felicities of expression; and this is more than can be said for either the play or the poem in which he has gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than Milton’s Satan, over the same ground of burning marl.  There is some spirit in the prodigal’s denunciation of his miserly father:  but the best thing in the pamphlet is the description of the soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name is given only in the revised and enlarged edition which appeared a year later under the title of “A Knight’s Conjuring; done in earnest; discovered in jest.”  The narrative of “William Eps his death” is a fine example of that fiery sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many pages of Dekker’s verse, and flashes out by fits through the murky confusion of his worst and most formless plays; but the introduction of thil hero is as fine a passage of prose as he has left us: 

The foremost of them was a personage of so composed a presence, that Nature and Fortune had done him wrong, if they had not made him a soldier. In his countenance there was a kind of indignation, fighting with a kind of exalted joy, which by his very gesture were apparently decipherable; for he was jocund, that his soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement through no more dangers:  yet were there bleeding witnesses enow on his breast, which testified, he did not yield till he was conquered, and was not conquered, till there was left nothing of a man in him to be overcome.

That the poet’s loyalty and devotion were at least as ardent when offered by his gratitude to sailors as to soldiers we may see by this description of “The Seaman” in his next work: 

A progress doth he take from realm to realm, With goodly water-pageants borne before him; The safety of the land sits at his helm, No danger here can touch, but what runs o’er him:  But being in heaven’s eye still, it doth restore him To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease, If thou wouldst know thy maker, search the seas.[1]

   [Footnote 1:  The italics are here the author’s.]