Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/128

108 fine art to chisel thought and to embody the inmost movements of the mind in everyday actions and familiar speech." For a little more intercourse with these admirably etched characters we would gladly have spared the tedious humours of the patient man, which fill up the comic scenes.  But this blending of the incongruous, this inequality of treatment, is the characteristic of Dekker's work, and indeed of the Elizabethan drama.  In lyric sweetness Dekker's songs are not surpassed by those of any writer of his age.

A robuster, if not a finer, genius than Dekker was Thomas Middleton, author of some of the gayest of the comedies of gulling, one or two more romantic and poetic plays, and a couple of tragedies of the grim and brutal type which appealed to the popular taste. He was born probably about 1570, and appears first in Henslowe's diary in the year 1602, collaborating with Munday, Drayton, Dekker, and Webster. The Old Law is conjecturally assigned to 1599, but Middleton's first published and an evidently early comedy is Blurt, Master Constable (1602). The romantic part is somewhat revolting, and this is not compensated for by the horse-play and bawdry of the comic scenes. Middleton collaborated in many of his plays with Dekker and with William Rowley, author of two independent