They that do change old love for new,
Pray Gods, they change for worse!”
Thomas Dekker.
Dekker was fellow of Peele and of the rest;[108] he quarrelled bitterly with Ben Jonson—they beating each other vilely with bad words, that can be read now (by whoso likes such reading) in the Poetaster of Jonson, or in the Satiromastix of Dekker. ’Twould be unfair, however, to judge him altogether by his play of the cudgels in this famous controversy. There is good meat in what Dekker wrote: he had humor; he had pluck; he had gift for using words—to sting or to praise—or to beguile one. There are traces not only of a Dickens flavor in him, but of a Lamb flavor as well; and there is reason to believe that, like both these later humorists, he made his conquests without the support of a university training. Swinburne characterizes him as a “modest, shiftless, careless nature:” but he was keen to thrust a pin into one who had offended his sensibilities; in his plays he warmed into pretty lyrical outbreaks, but never seriously measured out a work of large proportions, or entered upon execution of such with a calm, persevering temper. He was many-sided, not only literary-wise, but also conscience-wise. It seems incredible that one who should write the coarse things which appear in his Bachelor’s Banquet should also have elaborated, with a pious unction (that reminds of Jeremy Taylor) the saintly invocations of the Foure Birds of Noah’s Ark: and as for his Dreame it shows in parts a luridness of color which reminds of our own Wigglesworth—as if this New England poet of fifty years later may have dipped his brush into the same paint-pot. I cite a warm fragment from his Dreame of the Last Judgement;—
“Their cries, nor yelling did the Judge regard,
For all the doores of Mercy up were bar’d:
Justice and Wrath in wrinkles knit his forhead,
And thus he spake: You cursed and abhorred,
You brood of Sathan, sonnes of death and hell,