for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her
attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure
in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and
its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise
or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines,
homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined
rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep
the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if
not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four
scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two
following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they
have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the
coarser side of the genius whose finer aspect is shown in the sweetest
passages of the poem has never been disputed by any one capable of
learning the rudiments or the accidence of literary criticism. An
admirable novelist and poet who had the misfortune to mistake himself
for a theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to assert that he knew
not on what ground these brutal buffooneries had been assigned to their
unmistakable author; in other words, to acknowledge his ignorance of the
first elements of the subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone
of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when his unwary and
unscrupulous audacity of self-confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to
challenge John Henry Newman to the duel of which the upshot left him
gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament--not
even then did the author of _Hypatia_ display such a daring and
immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as
when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed
himself "aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us
to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is
Dekker's and all the poetry Massinger's." Now the words of Gifford's