Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/121

 is so passionate in its cry for deliverance from all danger of the miseries then or lately afflicting the continent that it might well have been put up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great war which Dekker might have lived to see break out in his own country. The prayer for the evening is so beautiful as to double our regret for the deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of all but the opening of the morning prayer. The feathers fallen from the wings of these 'Four Birds of Noah's Ark' would be worth more to the literary ornithologist than whole flocks of such 'tame villatic fowl' as people the ordinary coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature.

One work only of Dekker's too often overtasked and heavy-laden genius remains to be noticed: it is one which gives him a high place forever among English humourists. No sooner has the reader run his eye over the first three or four pages than he feels himself, with delight and astonishment, in the company of a writer whose genius is akin at once to Goldsmith's and to Thackeray's; a writer whose style is so pure and vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we