Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/122

 seem to have already entered upon the best age of English prose. Had Mr. Matthew Arnold, instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise, or had he condescended to glance over Daniel's compact and admirable 'Defence of Rhyme,' he would have found in writers of the despised Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our literature by writers of the age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at the opening of Dekker's pamphlet is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Molière, and the humours of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of Dickens. The lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in consequence of her obsequious husband's alleged neglect, 'no more like the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster'; the description of the poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening supper and the preliminary feast of scandal—are full of such bright and rich humour as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly. It is of