without." Tucca is the only character that he borrows, and a very ingenious idea it is—one of the best parts of the joke-to set Jonson's own free-spoken swaggerer to abuse himself. Dekker's Tucca is much more ably wrought out than Jonson's; he has a much finer command of what Widow Minever calls "horrible ungodly names"; and his devices to obtain money are equally shameless and amusing. All the other characters, and what plot there is, are Dekker's own; he, of course, uses the names Horace, Crispinus, and Demetrius, otherwise there would have been no point in his reply-but he gives them very different characters. William Rufus, whom Gifford supposed to be the "rude and ignorant soldier" of that name, is conjectured to have been no other than Shakespeare" learning's true Mæcenas, poesy's King"; and perhaps to a playwright like Dekker, Shakespeare might appear a true Mæcenas, although at first sight one would naturally think rather of the Earl of Pembroke or some other noble patron of letters. I am surprised that so able a critic as Mr Symonds. should say that Satiromastrix" is not to be named in thej same breath with the "Poetaster," and that its success must have been due to the acting. To be sure it does not reproduce the Court of Augustus with the same verisimilitude-its flight is much too light-winged and madding for any such scholarly achievement. The Court of Augustus would have broken the continuity of the play with yawning intervals; the frail, fallible, and romantic Court of William Rufus is more in keeping with its ebullient and victorious humour. "Satiromastrix," the castigation of the satirist, is not in itself a satire so much as a genial confident mockery it accomplished the main end of such productions - the applause of the playgoers; and I must confess that I for one should have been inclined to give the clever rogue a hand, however badly his counterblast had been put on the stage.

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Of Dekker's personal history few particulars are known. The dates both of his birth and of his death are only approximate conjectures. He seems to have made his living by plays, pageants, and prose pamphlets, and to have been almost as prolific and versatile as Defoe, although his labours did not always suffice to keep him out of "the Counter in the Poultry," and the King's Bench Prison. He is first named in 'Henslowe's Diary' in 1597, and he would seem to have been conjoined with Chettle, Haughton, Day, and Jonson on several plays before the close of the century. The first play published as his was "The Shoemaker's Holiday," in 1600: and the subsequent list is "The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus," 1600; "Satiromastrix," 1602; "Patient Grissel" (in conjunction with Chettle and Haughton), 1603; "The Honest Whore" (Part I.), 1604; "The Whore of Babylon," 1607; "Westward Ho!" "Northward Ho!" and "Sir Thomas Wyatt'

(in conjunction with Webster), 1607; “The Roaring Girl" (in conjunction with Middleton), 1611; "If it be not Good, the Devil is in it,” 1612; "The Virgin Martyr" (in conjunction with Massinger), 1622; "Match me in London," 1631; "The Wonder of a Kingdom" 1636; "The Sun's Darling" (not published till 1656); and "The Witch of Edmonton," 1658 (written in conjunction with Ford).

Dekker was a man of less determined painstaking than Chapman or Jonson, but of greater natural quickness and fineness of vision, more genial warmth of sympathy, and more copious spontaneity of expression. The fertility of his conception and the sweetness of his verse were not surpassed by any of his great contemporaries his melting tenderness of sympathy and light play of humour are peculiarly his own. He had more in common with Shakespeare than with any of the three sturdy writers whom we have been discussing. Hazlitt complains of Shakespeare's comic Muse, as such, that it is "too good-natured and magnanimous," that it "does not take the highest pleasure in making human nature look as mean, as ridiculous, and as contemptible as possible." This is plainly a characteristic of Shakespeare's comedy as distinguished from the Terentian manner; but I should not call it a fault. I know no reason why this should be placed outside the limits of what is strictly called comedy. I should be inclined to call this the crowning excellence of English comedy-that it is able to present such a web of the admirable and the ridiculous as life itself appears when viewed in a pleasant mood. This is the kind of comedy that Dekker naturally pursued. He had a very strong propensity towards fun, darted into every opening that promised laughter with the gleefulness of a boy; but he had also a strong love for the virtues, and a genial belief in human goodness, and delighted to picture an honest citizen, a repentant sinner, a relenting father, a merciful prince. Neither his humour nor his love for gentleness of heart was diminished by his poverty and frequent distress. If Dekker, as Jonson said, was a rogue and not to be trusted," he always took a kinder and more lenient view of humanity than appears in the plays of his enemy,-the stern scourge of vice and folly. Dekker's genius had many points of resemblance with Chaucer's.

If, with Hamlet, we take the purpose of playing to be "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," Dekker must receive a high place among the dramatists. There is none of them that has preserved so many lifelike intimations of the state of the various classes of society in that age. His plots are loosely constructed; but occasional scenes are wrought out with the utmost vividness, and the most complete and subtle exhibition of char

acter and habits. Dekker's being born in London, and his exceptional acquaintance with strange bedfellows in the course of his miserable life, gave him an advantage as the abstract and brief chronicle of the time over Shakespeare, who was bred in the country, and passed a comparatively prosperous and respectable life in London-apart altogether from the fact that Shakespeare's imagination would not let him rest content with so close a transcript of nature.

V. THOMAS MIDDLETON (1570-1627).

Middleton has not Dekker's lightness of touch and etherial purity of tenderness, but there are qualities in which he comes nearer than any contemporary dramatist to the master mind of the time. There is a certain imperial confidence in his use of words and imagery, a daring originality and impatient force of expression, an easy freedom of humour, wide of range yet thoroughly well in hand, such as we find in the same degree even in that age of giants in no Elizabethan saving only Shakespeare. It was as a comedian that Middleton first made his reputation, about the year 1607, comparatively late in life; and it would seem that he despaired of obtaining recognition for his powers in tragedy, for two of his most striking performances in that kind are interwoven with comic stories and the whole plays named after leading characters in the comic under-plot. Nobody would expect from the title of the "Mayor of Queenborough," the intensity and force that Middleton shows in the tragic scenes of that play. The title seems to require our attention for the humorous antics of the Mayor, Simon the tanner, an imitation of Dekker's Simon Eyre the shoemaker, Mayor of London. And similarly in The Changeling," which Middleton wrote in conjunction with Rowley, the dramatists seem to modestly intimate that they set store chiefly on the comic portions. Yet there are tragic passages in "The Changeling" unsurpassed for intensity of passion and appalling surprises in the whole range of Elizabethan literature. That these scenes were devised and written by Middleton will hardly be doubted by anybody acquainted with "The Mayor of Queenborough," and his later pure tragedy, "Women Beware Women." This last play is literally open to Jonson's sarcastic note on "Hamlet"-"Here the play of necessity ends, all the actors being killed." The slaughter in "Women Beware Women "extends to every character honoured with a name. Regarded as wholes, Middleton's tragedies fall very far short of the dignity of Shakespeare's. His heroes and heroines are not made of the same noble stuff, and their calamities have not the

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same grandeur. The characters are all so vile that the pity and terror produced by their death is almost wholly physical. But in the expression of incidental moments of passion, Middleton often rises to a sublime pitch of energy.

It may have been that Middleton, though only six years younger than Shakespeare, was born too late for tragedy. A complaint is made in "The Roaring Girl," in the composition of which he was conjoined with Dekker, that tragedies had gone out of fashion. "In the time of the great crop doublet," it is said, "your huge bombasted plays quilted with mighty words to lean purpose, were only then in the fashion; and as the doublet fell, neater inventions began to be set up." Under King James the taste was all for "light colour summer stuff, mingled with divers colours." Thus by the time that Middleton came into favour as a playwright, the atmosphere of the theatre was not encouraging to tragic composition. How far this influenced him in the devotion of his versatile powers to comedy, and how much was due to his individual character, it is of course impossible now to determine, for we have nothing but his plays to judge by. He began his literary life, like Marston, as a satirist, writing in the style popular at the end of the sixteenth century; but he achieved no great success in this artificial line of composition. His first triumph as a writer of comedy would seem to have been "A Trick to Catch the Old One."1 This, along with four others, was licensed in 1607. Chapman's "All Fools," the great exemplar and prototype of the English comedy of " gulling," had taken the town two years before, and Middleton threw himself into the fashion. In this type of comedy he is exceedingly happy, and surpasses his masters in ingenuity of construction, and easy accumulation of mirthful circumstances. The fun begins early, and goes on to the end with accelerating speed. Middleton excels peculiarly in the dramatic irony of making his gulls accessory to their own deception, and putting into their mouths statements that have, to those in the secret, a meaning very much beyond what they intend. "A Mad World, my Masters," licensed in 1608, is one of his happiest efforts in this vein. As bearing on Jonson's description of him as "a base fellow," it may be remarked that he professes to be more decent than some of his predecessors, and has a gird apparently at Marston or Jonson, as some obscene fellow, who cares not what he writes against others, yet rips up the most nasty vice in his own plays, and presents it to a

1 This play furnished the plot of Massinger's "New Way to Pay Old Debts." The titles of the plays, in fact, are interchangeable: both the scapegrace heroes extract by the same device rather more than their rights from usurious and grasping uncles. The character of Sir Giles has more force than any creation of Middleton's; but the germ of the character was probably taken from Middleton's "Pecunious Lucre," or Sir Alexander Wargrave in "The Roaring Girl.”

modest assembly. It is the excellency of a writer, says Middleton, to leave things better than he finds them. According to this principle, in the "Trick to Catch the Old One," and the "Mad World," the courtesans are married and made honest women the rakes are reclaimed; and though no lesson is weightily inculcated, there is less indecency than in the works of more pretentious moralists.

Middleton's name has of late been revived in connection with the authorship of "Macbeth." It has been conjectured, on the ground of certain slight coincidences between Middleton's play and the witch scenes, that Middleton had a hand in the composition of "Macbeth." 1 The supposition is about as groundless as any ever made in connection with Shakespeare, which is saying a good deal. Even if either author borrowed the words of the song from the other, that is no evidence of further co-operation. The plays are wholly different in spirit. "The Witch" is by no means one of Middleton's best plays. The plot is both intricate and feeble; and the witches, in spite of Charles Lamb's exquisite comparison of them with Shakespeare's, are, as stage creations, essentially comic and spectacular. With their ribald revelry, their cauldrons, their hideous spells and weird incantations, they are much more calculated to excite laughter than fear as exhibited on the stage, however much fitted to touch the chords of superstitious dread when transported by the imagination to their native wilds. The characters of the play do not treat them with sufficient respect to command the sympathy of the audience for them. Familiarity breeds contempt: if they had been consulted only by the Duchess with a view to the murder of her husband, they might have kept up an appearance of dignity and terror; but when the drunk Almachildes staggers in among them, upsets some of the beldams, and is received by Hecate as a favoured lover, we cease to have much respect for them, even though they do profess to exercise the terrible power of raising jars, jealousies, strifes, and heartburning disagreements like a thick scarf o'er life. The visit of the fantastical gentleman whom Hecate has thrice enjoyed in incubus, is a very happy inspiration in the same vein as Tam o' Shanter's admiration of the heroine of Alloway Kirk: the scene is a fine opportunity for a comic actor; but it is damaging to the respectability of the dread Hecate.

1 The chief resemblances are, that both poets introduce Hecate as the queen of the witches, and that the songs "Come away " and "Black Spirits," of which only the first words are given in "Macbeth," are set down in full in "The Witch." "The Witch" was not printed till 1778, when it was discovered in MS. by Mr Isaac Reed. If the songs were popular witch-songs, whether written before or after Shakespeare wrote "Macbeth," they may have been adopted in the stage copy of the play.