Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/123

 Shakespeare again that we are reminded in the next chapter, by the description of the equipage to which the husband of 'a woman that hath a charge of children' is reduced when he has to ride to the assizes in sorrier plight than Petruchio rode in to his wedding; the details remind us also of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity of their industrious realism: but the scene on his return reminds us rather of Thackeray at the best of his bitterest mood—the terrible painter of Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. 'The humour of a woman that marries her inferior by birth' deals with more serious matters in a style not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of the time—Shakespeare's always excepted—has a scene in it of richer and more original humour than brightens the narrative which relates the woes of the husband who invites his friends to dinner and finds everything under lock and key. Hardly in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so masterly as here—so vivid and so vigorous in its lifelike ease and spontaneity. But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the description of some fresh 'humour,' which would not deserve, did space and time allow of it, a separate note of commentary. The book is simply one of the very finest examples of humorous literature, touched now and then with serious and