device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should
have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and
her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade
in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and
vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.

But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us
understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of
"Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the demerits of the
two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross,
so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist
with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness
and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest,
was Thomas Heywood. In style and versification the patriotic and
anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of
"The Whore of Babylon" is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited
and fluent, with gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated
action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation
vacuous and vehement. An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a
tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the
"Persae"; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pass by him, remains
alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime
perfection. Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the
task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the
utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing. The Empress of Babylon
is but a poor slipshod ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic
beadle: "non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e passa."

Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays
in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took