Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/105

 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 note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint and the angel, are these: 'What follows is exquisitely beautiful I am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker.' And seeing that no mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate citation of evidence.

There are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens or of sluts; but when we consider the quantity of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle through with such occasionally