infallible judge, whose praise has
set the name of Rowley so high in the rank of realistic painters and
historic naturalists forever.

The copies of two dramatic nondescripts now happily preserved and duly
treasured in the library of the British Museum bear inscribed in the
same old hand, at the head of the first page and again on the last page
under the last line, the same contemptuous three words--"silly old
story." And I fear it can hardly be maintained that either Chapman, when
writing "The Blind Beggar of Alexandria," or Rowley, when writing "A
Shoemaker, a Gentleman," was engaged in any very rational or felicitous
employment of his wayward and unregulated powers. "The Printer" of the
play last named assures "the Reader" of 1638, whom he assumes to be a
member of the gentle craft, that "as plays were then, some twenty years
agone, it was in the fashion." A singular fashion, the rare modern
reader will probably reflect: especially when he remembers how far finer
and how thoroughly charming a tribute of dramatic and poetic celebration
had been paid full eighteen years earlier to the same favored craft by
the sweeter and rarer genius of Dekker. This quaintly apologetic
assurance of by-gone popularity in subject and in style will remind all
probable readers of Heywood's prologue to "The Royal King and Loyal
Subject," and his dedicatory address prefixed to "The Four Prentices of
London." It happily was not, however, in the printer's power to aver
that such impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once breaks ground
with was ever in fashion with any of his famous fellows. Nothing can be
worse than the headlong and slipshod stumble of Dekker's at its worst;
but his were the faults of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped
work: Rowley's, if I mistake not, is the far graver error of a
preposterous theory that broken verse, rough and untunable as the shock
of short chopping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural speech
of men and women than the rolling and flowing verse of Marlowe and of
Shakespeare: which is as much liker life as it is nobler and more
satisfying in workmanship. In reading bad verse the reader is constantly
reminded that he is not reading good prose; and this is not the effect
produced by true realism--the impression left by actual intercourse or
faithful presentation of it.

The hagiology of this eccentric play is more like Shirley's in "St.
Patrick for Ireland" than Dekker's and Massinger's