verses, but the accent of them is unmistakable as that of Dekker.

Go, let music
Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence
Through all this building, that her sphery soul
May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms
Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed.

This delicate fluency and distilled refinement of expression ought
properly, one would say, to have belonged to a poet of such careful and
self-respectful genius as Tennyson's: whereas in the very next speech of
the same speaker we stumble over such a phrase as that which closes the
following sentence:

We feed, wear rich attires, and strive to cleave
The stars with marble towers, fight battles, spend
Our blood to buy us names, _and, in iron hold,
Will we eat roots, to imprison fugitive gold_.

Which he who can parse, let him scan, and he who can scan, let him
construe. It is alike incredible and certain that the writer of such
exquisite and blameless verse as that in which the finer scenes of "Old
Fortunatus" and "The Honest Whore" are so smoothly and simply and
naturally written should have been capable of writing whole plays in
this headlong and halting fashion, as helpless and graceless as the
action of a spavined horse or a cripple who should attempt to run.

It is difficult to say what part of these plays should be assigned to
Webster. Their rough realistic humor, with its tone of somewhat
coarse-grained good-nature, strikes the habitual note of Dekker's comic