For, as
Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for anything"; at all events, for
anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest
degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and
cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and
an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the one great gift of
seriousness, of noble ambition, of self-confidence rooted in
self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable
place among the immortal writers of his age. But this gift had been so
absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by
circumstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy
of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and
now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his
writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his
later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's
infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or
impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before
his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately
developed.
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