but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not to
be trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there was
any but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly the
opposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it is
particularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote in
collaboration, one invariable tone, and that the same as is to be found in
his undoubtedly independent work, appears alike in plays signed with him by
persons so different as Middleton and Webster, as Chettle and Ford. When
this is the case, the inference is certain, according to the strictest
rules of logic. We can define Dekker's idiosyncrasy almost more certainly
than if he had never written a line except under his own name. That
idiosyncrasy consists, first, of an exquisite lyrical faculty, which, in
the songs given in all collections of extracts, equals, or almost equals,
that of Shakespere; secondly, of a faculty for poetical comedy, for the
comedy which transcends and plays with, rather than grasps and exposes, the
vices and follies of men; thirdly, for a touch of pathos again to be evened
only to Shakespere's; and lastly, for a knack of representing women's
nature, for which, except in the master of all, we may look in vain
throughout the plentiful dramatic literature of the period, though touches
of it appear in Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Heywood, in
Middleton, and in some of the anonymous plays which have been fathered
indifferently, and with indifferent hopelessness of identification, on some
of the greatest of names of the period, on some of the meanest, and on an
equal number of those that are neither great nor mean.

Dekker's very interesting prose works we shall treat in the next chapter,
together with the other tracts into whose class they fall, and some of his
plays may either go unnoticed, or, with those of the dramatists who
collaborated with him, and whose (notably in the case of _The Roaring
Girl_) they pretty evidently were more than his. His own characteristic
pieces, or those in which his touch shows most clearly, though they may not
be his entirely, are _The Shoemaker's Holiday_, _Old Fortunatus_,
_Satiromastix_, _Patient Grissil_, _The Honest Whore_, _The Whore of
Babylon_, _If it be not Good the Devil is in it_, _The Virgin Martyr_,
_Match me in London_, _The Son's Darling_, and _The Witch of Edmonton_. In
everyone of these the same characteristics appe