A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, that are old age’s alms.
But though from court to cottage I depart,
My saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.”
There is a pensiveness in this, half pleasurable, half melancholy, that has a charm of its own.
Thomas Dekker is a far more important person. Most of his works seem to have been what artists call pot-boilers, written at ruinous speed, and with the bailiff rather than the Muse at his elbow. There was a liberal background of prose in him, as in Ben Jonson, but he was a poet and no mean one, as he shows by the careless good luck of his epithets and similes. He could rise also to a grave dignity of style that is grateful to the ear, nor was he incapable of that heightened emotion which might almost pass for passion. His fancy kindles wellnigh to imagination at times, and ventures on those extravagances which entice the fancy of the reader as with the music of an invitation to the waltz. I had him in my mind when I was speaking of the obiter dicta, of the fine verses dropt casually by these men when you are beginning to think they have no poetry in them. Fortune tells Fortunatus, in the play of that name, that he shall have gold as countless as
“Those gilded wantons that in swarms do run
To warm their slender bodies in the sun,”
thus giving him a hint also of its ephemeral nature. Here is a verse, too, that shows a kind of bleakish sympathy of sound and sense. Long life, he tells us,—
“Is a long journey in December gone.”