style of a born poet than is the usual style of Middleton.  Dekker would have taken a high place among the finest if not among the greatest of English poets if he had but had the sense of form—­the instinct of composition.  Whether it was modesty, indolence, indifference, or incompetence, some drawback or shortcoming there was which so far impaired the quality of his strong and delicate genius that it is impossible for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say or think of his very best work that it really does him justice—­that it adequately represents the fulness of his unquestionable powers.  And yet it is certain that Lamb was not less right than usual when he said that Dekker “had poetry enough for anything.”  But he had not constructive power enough for the trade of a playwright—­the trade in which he spent so many weary years of ill-requited labor.  This comedy in which we first find him associated with Middleton is well written and well contrived, and fairly diverting—­especially to an idle or an uncritical reader:  though even such an one may suspect that the heroine here represented as a virginal virago must have been in fact rather like Dr. Johnson’s fair friend Bet Flint; of whom the Great Lexicographer “used to say that she was generally slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief” (Boswell, May 8, 1781).  The parallel would have been more nearly complete if Moll Cutpurse “had written her own Life in verse,” and brought it to Selden or Bishop Hall with a request that he would furnish her with a preface to it.

The plays of Middleton are not so properly divisible into tragic and comic as into realistic and romantic—­into plays of which the mainspring is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical.  Two only of the former class remain to be mentioned:  “Anything for a Quiet Life” and “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.”  There is very good stuff in the plot or groundwork of the former, but the workmanship is hardly worthy of the material, Mr. Bullen ingeniously and plausibly suggests the partnership of Shirley in this play:  but the conception of the character in which he discerns a likeness to the touch of the lesser dramatist is happier and more original than such a comparison would indicate.  The young stepmother whose affectation of selfish levity and grasping craft is really designed to cure her husband of his infatuation, and to reconcile him with the son who regards her as his worst enemy, is a figure equally novel, effective, and attractive.  The honest shopkeeper and his shrewish wife may remind us again of Dickens by their points of likeness to Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; though the reformation of the mercer’s jealous vixen is brought about by more humorous and less tragical means than the repentance of the law-stationer’s “little woman.”  George the apprentice, through whose wit and energy this happy consummation becomes possible, is a very original and amusing example of the young Londoner of the period.  But there is more humor, though very little chastity, in the “Chaste Maid”; a play of quite exceptional freedom and audacity, and certainly one of the drollest and liveliest that ever broke the bounds of propriety or shook the sides of merriment.