The part taken by Rowley in this play is easy for any tiro in criticism to verify.  The rough and crude genius of that perverse and powerful writer is not seen here by any means at its best.  I should say that his call was rather toward tragedy than toward comedy; that his mastery of severe and serious emotion was more genuine and more natural than his command of satirical or grotesque realism.  The tragedy in which he has grappled with the subject afterward so differently handled in the first and greatest of Landor’s tragedies is to me of far more interest and value than such comedies as that which kindled the enthusiasm of a loyal Londoner in the civic sympathies of Lamb.  Disfigured as it is toward the close by indulgence in mere horror and brutality after the fashion of Andronicus or Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and pathos in its best scenes than a reader of his comedies would have expected.  But in the underplot of “A Fair Quarrel” Rowley’s besetting faults of coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet of finer if not of sturdier genius.  The same sense of discord and inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better parts of “The Old Law.”  The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical interludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and hastiest scenes of Middleton’s writing:  while the sweet and noble dignity of the finer passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on every line and in every cadence.  But for sheer bewildering incongruity there is no play known to me which can be compared with “The Mayor of Queenborough.”  Here again we find a note so dissonant and discordant in the lighter parts of the dramatic concert that we seem at once to recognize the harsher and hoarser instrument of Rowley.  The farce is even more extravagantly and preposterously mistimed and misplaced than that which disfigures the play just mentioned:  but I thoroughly agree with Mr. Bullen’s high estimate of the power displayed and maintained throughout the tragic and poetic part of this drama; to which no previous critic has ever vouchsafed a word of due acknowledgment.  The story is ugly and unnatural, but its repulsive effect is transfigured or neutralized by the charm of tender or passionate poetry; and it must be admitted that the hideous villany of Vortiger and Horsus affords an opening for subsequent scenic effects of striking and genuine tragical interest.

The difference between the genius of Middleton and the genius of Dekker could not be better illustrated than by comparison of their attempts at political and patriotic allegory.  The lazy, slovenly, impatient genius of Dekker flashes out by fits and starts on the reader of the play in which he has expressed his English hatred of Spain and Popery, his English pride in the rout of the Armada, and his English gratitude