underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening supper and the preliminary feast of scandal—­are full of such bright and rich humor as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly.  It is of 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 humor 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 humor 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 life-like ease and spontaneity.  But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the description of some fresh “humor,” 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 even tragic effect, that can be found in any language; it is generally and comparatively remarkable for its freedom from all real coarseness or brutality, though the inevitable change of manners between Shakespeare’s time and our own may make some passages or episodes seem now and then somewhat over-particular in plain speaking or detail.  But a healthier, manlier, more thoroughly good-natured and good-humored book was never written; nor one in which the author’s real and respectful regard for womanhood was more perceptible through the veil of a satire more pure from bitterness and more honest in design.

The list of works over which we have now glanced is surely not inconsiderable; and yet the surviving productions of Dekker’s genius or necessity are but part of the labors of his life.  If he wanted—­as undoubtedly he would seem to have wanted—­that “infinite capacity for taking pains” which Carlyle professed to regard as the synonyme of genius, he was at least not deficient in that rough-and-ready diligence which is habitually in harness, and cheerfully or resignedly prepared for the day’s work.  The names of his lost plays—­all generally suggestive of some true dramatic interest, now graver and now lighter—­are too numerous to transcribe:  but one at least of them must excite unspeakable amazement as well as indiscreet curiosity in every reader of Ariosto or La Fontaine who comes in the course of the