Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/204

 It should not have been left to a later hand—it should surely have been the privilege of Lamb's or Hazlitt's, and perhaps rather Hazlitt's than even Lamb's—to unearth and to transcribe the quaint and spirited description of Thames watermen 'howling, hollowing, and calling for passengers, as if all the hags in hell had been imprisoned, and begging at the gate, fiends and furies that (God be thanked) could vex the soul but not torment it, yet indeed their most power was over the body, for here an audacious mouthing-randing-impudent-scullery-wastecoat-and-bodied rascal would have hail'd a penny from us for his scullerships.'

Could Rabelais himself have described them better, or with vigour of humorous expression more heartily and enjoyably characteristic of his own all but incomparable genius?

The good old times, as remote in Shakespeare's day as in our own, were never more delightfully described than by Rowley in this noble and simple phrase: 'Then was England's whole year but a St. George's day.'

Webster wished that what he wrote might be read by the light of Shakespeare: an admirer of Rowley might hope and must wish that he should be read by the light of Lamb. His comedies have real as well as realistic merit: not equal to