t-headed young prince. This too is very like
Dekker, whose idle and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain a
diffused or divided interest, but except when working hopelessly and
heartlessly against time was likely to fix on some special point, and
give life at least to some single figure.

There is nothing incongruous in his appearance as a playwright in
partnership with Middleton or with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day;
but a stranger association than that of Massinger's name with Dekker's
it would not be easy to conceive. Could either poet have lent the other
something of his own best quality, could Massinger have caught from
Dekker the freshness and spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and
Dekker have learned of Massinger the conscientious excellence and
studious self-respect of his dramatic workmanship, the result must have
been one of the noblest and completest masterpieces of the English
stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful play which we owe to the
alliance of their powers is a proverbial example of incongruous
contrasts and combinations. The opening and the closing scenes were very
properly and very fortunately consigned to the charge of the younger and
sedater poet: so that, whatever discrepancy may disturb the intervening
acts, the grave and sober harmonies of a temperate and serious artist
begin and end the concert in perfect correspondence of consummate
execution. "The first act of 'The Virgin Martyr,'" said Coleridge, "is
as fine an act as I remember in any play." And certainly it would be
impossible to find one in which the business of the scene is more
skilfully and smoothly opened, with more happiness of arrangement, more
dignity and dexterity of touch. But most lovers of poetry would give it
all, and a dozen such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical composition,
for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her
attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure
in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and
its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise
or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines,
homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined
rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep
the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if
not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four
sce