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, In fires that still shall burne, you still shall dwell; In hoopes of Iron: then were they bound up strong, (Shrikes [shrieks] being the Burden of their dolefull song) Scarce was Sentence breath’d-out, but mine eies Even saw (me thought) a Caldron, whence did rise A pitchy Steeme of Sulphure and thick Smoake, Able whole coapes of Firmament to choake: About this, Divels stood round, still blowing the fire, Some, tossing Soules, some whipping them with wire, Across the face, as up to th’ chins they stood In boyling brimstone, lead and oyle, and bloud.”