than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker's lyric notes.
Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson's songs for their finish of style
and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or
should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to
place him in the first class--much less, in the front rank--of lyric
poets. He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron;
but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as
Blake or Shelley. Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and
delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the
well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor
which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this
same year of the accession of James--"Patient Grissel"; a romantic
tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and
touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of
the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone before them
with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of
gesture. His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to
reproduce: but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and
simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy
to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off.[1] Chettle
and Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of
them something of their colleague's finer qualities; but the best scenes
in the play remind me rather of Dekker's best early work than of
"Robert, Earl of Huntington" or of "Englishmen for My Money." So much
has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English
character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such
confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent
penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at
least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a
frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant