Amongst the group that might be assembled at the Falcon, let us first trace the lineaments of Thomas Dekker. He has not yet quarrelled with Jonson. He has no tbeen held up to contempt as Demetrius in the Poetaster,' nor returned the satire with more than necessary vehemence in the Satiro-Mastix He is one who has looked upon the world with an observant eye; one of whom it has been said that his "pamphlets and plays alone would furnish a more complete view of the habits and customs of his contemporaries in vulgar and middle life than could easily be collected from all the grave annals of the times." "'* His Gull's Horn-Book' has not yet appeared; but its writer can season his talk with the most amusing relations of the humours of Paul's Walk, of the ordinary, of the playhouse, of the tavern. He was not a very young man at the period of which we write. In 1631 he says, "I have been a priest in Apollo's temple many years; my voice is decaying with my age." He is confident in his powers; and claims to be a satirist by as indefeasible a title as that of his greater rival:-"I am snake-proof; and though, with Hannibal, you bring whole hogsheads of vinegar-railings, it is impossible for you to quench or come over my Alpine resolution. I will sail boldly and desperately alongst the shores of the isle of Gulls; and in defiance of those terrible blockhouses, their loggerheads, make a true discovery of their wild yet habitable country." He has many a joke against the gallants whom he has noted even that afternoon sitting on the stage in all the glory of their coxcombry-on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality. The proportionable leg, the white hand, the lovelock of the essenced fop, have none of them passed unmarked. The red beard artistically dyed according to the most approved fashion supplies many a laugh; especially if the wearer had risen to be gone in the middle of the scene, saluting his gentle acquaintance to the discomfiture of the mimics. He, above all, is quizzed who hoards up the play scraps upon which his lean wit most savourily feeds in the presence of the Euphuesed gentlewomen. Dekker has been that morning in Paul's Walk, in the Mediterranean Aisle. He has noted one who walks there from day to day, even till lamp-light, for he is safe from his creditors. One more fortunate parades his silver spurs in the open choir, that he may challenge admiration as he draws forth his perfumed embroidered purse to pay the forfeit to the surpliced choristers. Another is waited upon by his tailor, who steps behind a pillar with his table-book to note the last fashion which hath made its appearance there, and to commend it to his worship's admiration. Equally familiar is the satirist with the ordinary. He tells of a most absolute gull tha he has marked riding thither upon his Spanish iennet, with a French lacquey carrying his cloak, who having entered the public room walks up and down scornfully with a sneer and a sour face to promise quarrelling; who, when he does speak, discourses how often this lady has sent her coach for him, and how he has sweat in the tennis-court with that lord. An unfledged poet, too, he has marked, who drops a sonnet out of the arge fold of his glove, which he at last reads to the company with a pretty counterfeit lothness. He has a story of the last gull whom he saw there, skeldered of his money at primero and hazard, who sat as patiently as a disarmed gentleman in the hands of the bailiffs. At the tavern he has drawn out a country gentleman that has brought his wife to town to learn the fashions, and see the tombs at Westminster, and the lions in the Tower; and is already glib with the names of the drawers, Jack and Will and Tom: the tavern is to him so delightful, with its suppers, its Canary, its tobacco, and its civil hostess. at the bar, that it is odds but he will give up housekeeping. Above all, "the satirical rogue" is familiar with the habits of those who hear the chimes at midnight. He knows how they shun the waking watch and play tricks with the sleeping, and he hears the pretenders to gentility call aloud Sir Giles, or Sir Abraham, will you turn this way? Every form of pretence is familiar to him. He has watched his gull critical upon new books in a stationer's shop, and has tracked him through all his vagaries at the tobacco ordinary, the barber's, the fence-school, and the dancing-school. Thomas Dekker is certainly one of those who gather humours from all men; but his wit is not of the highest or the most delicate character; yet is he listened to and laughed at by many of nobler intellect who say little. He knows the town, and he makes the most of his knowledge. Though he is a "high flyer in wit," as Edward Philipps calls him, yet is he a poet. At this very time he is engaged with Henry Chettle and William Haughton in the composition of Patient Grissil' for Henslowe's theatre, in earnest of which they received three pounds of good and lawful money on the 19th of December, 1599. There is one of the partners in this drama who has drunk his inspiration at the well of Chaucer. The exquisite beauty of The Clerk's Tale' must have rendered it exceedingly difficult to have approached such a subject; but a man of real genius has produced the serious scenes of the comedy, and it is difficult to assign them to any other of the trio but Dekker. Might not some Jack Wilson* have, for the first time, touched his lute to the following exquisite song, for the suffrages of the gay party at the Falcon ? "Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? Oh, sweet content! Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplexed? Oh, punishment! Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vexed Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Then hey noney, noney, hey noney, noney. Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring? Oh, sweet content! Swimm'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears? Oh, punishment ! * A singer of Shakspere's company. See Much Ado about Nothing, Introductory Notice. Then he that patiently want's burden bears, No burden bears, but is a king, a king! Oh, sweet content! &c. Work apace," &c. There is one, we may believe, in that company of poets who certainly "is thought not the meanest of English poets of that time, and particularly for his dramatic writings." George Chapman, as Anthony Wood tells us, "was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet." Anthony Wood has a low notion of the poetical character, as many other prosaic people have. He tells us of an unhappy verse-maker of small merit who was "exceedingly given to the vices of poets." Chapman was, however, the senior of the illustrious band who lighted up the close of the sixteenth century, and might be more reverend than many of them. He was seven years older than Shakspere, being born in 1557. Yet his inventive faculties were brilliant to the last. Jonson told Drummond, in 1619, that "next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque." He said also, what was more important, that "Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him." No one can doubt the vigour of the poet who translated twelve books of the Iliad in six weeks, the daring fiery spirit of him who, in the opinion of the more polished translator, gave us a Homer such as he might have been before he had come to the years of discretion. This is meant by Pope for censure. Meres, in 1598, enumerates Chapman amongst the "tragic poets," and also amongst the "best poets for comedy." We have no evidence that he wrote before the period when Shakspere raised the drama out of chaos. He had not the power to become a great dramatist in the strict sense of the word; for his genius was essentially didactic. He could not go out of himself to paint all the varieties of passion and character in vivid action; but he could analyze the passion, exhibit its peculiarities, describe its current, with wondrous force and originality, throwing in touches of the purest poetry, clothed in the most splendid combinations of language. Dryden has not done justice to him, when he says that "a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words is his characteristic." There are the gigantic words, but the thought is rarely dwarfish. Had he become a dramatist ten years earlier, as he well might from the period in which he was born, we should have found more extravagance and less poetical fire. Shakspere rendered the drama not so easy of approach by inferior men, as it was in the early days of the Greenes and Peeles. Chapman with his undramatic mind has done wonders in his own way. Beside the man of reverend aspect sits a young scholar, who is anxious to say, I too am a poet. John Fletcher was born in 1576. His father, the Bishop of London-he who poured into the ears of the unhappy Mary of Scots on the scaffold that verbosam orationem, as Camden has it, which had more regard to his own preferment than the Queen's conversion-he who, marrying a second time, fell under his royal mistress's displeasure, and died of grief and excessive tobacco, in 1596, "“seeking to lose his sorrow in a mist of smoke,' he has left his son John to carry his "sail of phantasy" into the dangerous waters of the theatre. The union of real talent with fashionable pretension, which in time made him one of the most popular of dramatists, and the lyrical genius which will place him for ever amongst the first of English poets, were budding only at the close of the sixteenth century. We can scarcely believe that his genius was only called out by the "wonderful consimility of fancy" between him and Francis Beaumont; and that his first play was produced only in 1607, when he was thirty-one and Beaumont twenty-one. It is possible that in his earlier days he wrote in conjunction with some of the veterans of the drama. Shakspere is held to have been associated with him in the Two Noble Kinsmen.' We have discussed that question elsewhere; and it is scarcely necessary for us to attempt any summary here, for the reason of our belief that the union, if any there were, was not with Shakspere. At this period Fletcher would be gathering materials, at any rate, for some of those pictures of manners which reveal to us too much of the profligacy of the fine people of the beginning of the seventeenth century. The society of the great minds into which he would be thrown at the Falcon, and the Mermaid, and the Apollo Saloon, would call out and cherish that freshness of his poetical nature which survives, and indeed often rides over, the sapless conventionalities and frigid licentiousness of his fashionable experience. In the company of Shakspere, and Jonson, and Chapman, and Donne, he would be taught there was something more in the friendship, and even in the mere intercourse of conviviality, of men of high intellect, than the town could give. He would learn from Jonson's 'Leges Convivales,' that there was a charm in the social hours of the "eruditi, urbani, hilares, honesti," which was rarely found amidst the courtly hunters after plea * Fuller's Worthies.' sure; and that a festival with them was something better than even the excitement of wine and music. A few years after this Fletcher ventured out of the track of that species of comedy in which he won his first success, giving a real poem to the public stage, which, with all its faults, was a noble attempt to emulate the lyrical and pastoral genius of Shakspere. To our minds there is as much covert advice, if not gentle reproof, to Fletcher, as there is of just and cordial praise, in Jonson's verses upon the condemnation of The Faithful Shepherdess' by the audience of 1610 "The wise, and many-headed bench, that sits Upon the life and death of plays and wits, (Compos'd of gamester, captain, knight, knight's man, Lady, or pucelle, that wears mask or fan, Velvet, or taffata cap, rank'd in the dark With the shop's foreman, or some such brave spark That may judge for his sixpence) had, before They saw it half, damn'd thy whole play, and more: I, that am glad thy innocence was thy guilt, And wish that all the Muses' blood were spilt Or moths shall eat what all those fools admire." There is another young poet who has fairly won his title to a place amongst the most eminent of his day. John Donne is there, yet scarcely seven-andtwenty; who wrote the most vigorous satires that the English language had seen as early as 1593. No printed copy exists of them of an earlier date than that of his collected works in 1633; but there is an undoubted manuscript of the three first satires in the British Museum, bearing the title "Ihon Dunne |