Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/80

 out or his conceptions adequately developed. His 'pleasant Comedie of The Gentle Craft,' first printed three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if rather thin-spun and slight of structure: but the more serious and romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in ostentation and repetition of jocose catch-words after the fashion of mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no signs of the author's higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker's which bears the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and emotion, feeling and fancy, colour and melody, are as apparent as his ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous passage in which Webster couples together the names of 'Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood,' seems explicable when we compare the style of 'Old Fortunatus'