acomo Gentili, in his play of "The
Wonder of a Kingdom." When Gentili's steward brings him the book in
which the amount of his charities is recorded, he exclaims
impatiently:--

"Thou vain vainglorious fool, go burn that book;
No herald needs to blazon charity's arms.

* * * *

I launch not forth a ship, with drums and guns
And trumpets, to proclaim my gallantry;
He that will read the wasting of my gold
Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind
Will scatter ere he spells it."

He will have neither wife nor children. When, he says,

"I shall have one hand in heaven,
To write my happiness in leaves of stars,
A wife would pluck me by the other down.
This bark has thus long sailed about the world,
My soul the pilot, and yet never listened
To such a mermaid's song.

* * * *

My heirs shall be poor children fed on alms;
Soldiers that want limbs; scholars poor and scorned;
And these will be a sure inheritance
Not to decay; manors and towns will fall,
Lordships and parks, pastures and woods, be sold;
But this land still continues to the lord:
No tricks of law can me beguile of this.
But of the beggar's dish, I shall drink healths
To last forever; whilst I live, my roof
Shall cover naked wretches; when I die,
'T is dedicated to St. Charity."

We should not do justice to Dekkar's disposition, even after these
quotations, did we omit that enumeration of positives and negatives
which, in his view, make up the character of the happy man:--

"He that in the sun is neither beam nor moat,
He that's not mad after a petticoat,
He for whom poor men's curse dig no grave,
He that is neither lord's nor lawyer's slave,
He that makes This his sea and That his shore,
He that in 's coffin is richer than before,
He that counts Youth his sword and Age his staff.
He that upon his death-bed is a swan.
And dead no crow,--he is a Happy Man."

As Dekkar wrote under the constant goad of necessity, he seems to have
been indifferent to the requirements of art. That "wet-eyed wench,
Care," was as absent from his ink as from his soul. Even his best plays,
"Old Fortunatus," "The Wonder of a Kingdom," and another whose title
cannot be mentioned, are good in particular scenes and characters rather
than good as wholes. Occasionally, as in the character of Signior
Orlando Frisco