mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to
repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond
all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no
signs of the author's higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and
sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not
required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker's which bears
the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and
emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his
ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous passage in which
Webster couples together the names of "Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and
Mr. Heywood," seems explicable when we compare the style of "Old
Fortunatus" with the style of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Dekker had as
much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of
Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely and noble
realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride
of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic
loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he
was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels
in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the
world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these
occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to
such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos
which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of
Shakespeare's, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in
comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names
of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or
most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common
with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of
Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just
when he said of the "frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he talks