Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/106

 admirable and memorable results, we are once more inclined to reclaim for her a place of honour among her more generally respectable or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what I see no reason to suppose, that she was responsible for the dismal drivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that a poet must be found guilty of its authorship. And we know that a pamphlet or novelette of Deloney's called 'Thomas of Reading; or, the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West,' was ascribed to Dekker until the actual author was discovered. Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first collected