The rough and
rapid work which absorbed too much of this poet's time and toil seems
almost incongruous with the impression made by the noble and thoughtful
face, so full of gentle dignity and earnest composure, in which we
recognize the graver and loftier genius of a man worthy to hold his own
beside all but the greatest of his age. And that age was the age of
Shakespeare.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
Of all the poets and humorists who lit up the London stage for half a
century of unequalled glory, William Rowley was the most thoroughly
loyal Londoner: the most evidently and proudly mindful that he was a
citizen of no mean city. I have always thought that this must have been
the conscious or unconscious source of the strong and profound interest
which his very remarkable and original genius had the good-fortune to
evoke from the sympathies of Charles Lamb. That divine cockney, if the
word may be used--and "why in the name of glory," to borrow the phrase
of another immortal fellow-townsman, should it not be?--as a term of no
less honor than Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman,
has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic
praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far
lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or
prose.
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