In despite of his rare occasional spurts
or outbreaks of self-assertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us
a man of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, irritable and
placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient
in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed,
and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected. There is no
unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often--nay, too
constantly--in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.
What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre
of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and
thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or
to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and
infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place
among the humorists and the poets of his country.
JOHN MARSTON
If justice has never been done, either in his own day or in any after
age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be
presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in
great part his own fault.
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