inconsequence of style—­the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of absolute and headlong collapse—­are qualities by which a very novice in the study of dramatic form may recognize the reckless and unmistakable presence of Dekker.  The curt and grim precision of Webster’s tone, his terse and pungent force of compressed rhetoric, will be found equally difficult to trace in any of these three plays.  “Northward Ho!” a clever, coarse, and vigorous study of the realistic sort, has not a note of poetry in it, but is more coherent, more sensibly conceived and more ably constructed, than the rambling history of Wyatt or the hybrid amalgam of prosaic and romantic elements in the compound comedy of “Westward Ho!” All that is of any great value in this amorphous and incongruous product of inventive impatience and impetuous idleness can be as distinctly traced to the hand of Dekker as the crowning glories of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” can be traced to the hand of Shakespeare.  Any poet, even of his time, might have been proud of these verses, but the accent of them is unmistakable as that of Dekker.

                             Go, let music
   Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence
   Through all this building, that her sphery soul
   May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms
   Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed.

This delicate fluency and distilled refinement of expression ought properly, one would say, to have belonged to a poet of such careful and self-respectful genius as Tennyson’s:  whereas in the very next speech of the same speaker we stumble over such a phrase as that which closes the following sentence: 

   We feed, wear rich attires, and strive to cleave
   The stars with marble towers, fight battles, spend
   Our blood to buy us names, and, in iron hold,
   Will we eat roots, to imprison fugitive gold.

Which he who can parse, let him scan, and he who can scan, let him construe.  It is alike incredible and certain that the writer of such exquisite and blameless verse as that in which the finer scenes of “Old Fortunatus” and “The Honest Whore” are so smoothly and simply and naturally written should have been capable of writing whole plays in this headlong and halting fashion, as helpless and graceless as the action of a spavined horse or a cripple who should attempt to run.

It is difficult to say what part of these plays should be assigned to Webster.  Their rough realistic humor, with its tone of somewhat coarse-grained good-nature, strikes the habitual note of Dekker’s comic style:  there is nothing of the fierce and scornful intensity, the ardor of passionate and compressed contempt, which distinguishes the savagely humorous satire of Webster and of Marston, and makes it hopeless to determine by intrinsic evidence how little or how much was added by Webster in the second edition to the original text of Marston’s Malcontent: