of this passage should hitherto have done so.]

Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of passionate
fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more
perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity,
his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way
of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to
impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he
had set himself--and yet which he had hardly set himself--to run. And if
these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what
would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this
golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or
fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution
into his fancies. But even from such headlong recklessness as he had
already displayed no reader could have anticipated so singular a
defiance of all form and order, all coherence and proportion, as is
exhibited in his "Satiromastix." The controversial part of the play is
so utterly alien from the romantic part that it is impossible to regard
them as component factors of the same original plot. It seems to me
unquestionable that Dekker must have conceived the design, and probable
that he must have begun the composition, of a serious play on the
subject of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of
Ben Jonson's "Poetaster" impelled or instigated him to some immediate
attempt at rejoinder; and that being in a feverish hurry to retort the
blow inflicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he devised--perhaps
between jest and earnest--the preposterously incoherent plan of piecing
out his farcical and satirical design by patching and stitching it into
his unfinished scheme of tragedy. It may be assumed, and it is much to
be hoped, that there never existed another poet capable of
imagining--much less of perpetrating--an incongruity so monstrous and so