The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in "The Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The Seven Deadly Sins of London" shows a helpless horror of the crowded poverty of the town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of Dekker's tracts a genius akin to Goldsmith's, Thackeray's, Sterne's, Molière's, Dickens's, and not unlike Shakespeare's; with Goldsmith he is often compared; he has given men medicines to make them love him. Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contributions are discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. Of his own pieces, "The Shoe Maker's Holiday" (1600) is a broadly cheerful comedy; the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the upper plot, the hero, Lacy, is very readily pardoned after deserting his regiment in France to woo another Mayor's daughter in the disguise of a shoemaker. "The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a Magdalen redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its earthly close; she marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, she plays the Patient Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an old serving-man. There is abundance of the inevitable ribaldry. In a play devoted to "Patient Grissil," that ideal of the dramatists, occurs the lovely lyric "Art thou poor, Yet hast thou golden slumbers"; in "Old Fortunatus" (in the story of the Magical Purse) is "Fortune's kind, cry holiday": other pretty songs occur in "The Sun's Darling" (Ford and Dekker). "Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise of audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. There are fine _tirades_ of imaginative blank verse in "Fortunatus". Dekker admired a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or needing no conversion, as most of his fraternity and as Fielding did. But Fortune, if she sometimes "cried holiday" to Dekker, was never "kind". He is best remembered for his songs and for the words the best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed. When Lamb tells us that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything": when Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement, and an exquisite simplicity of expression," we wish to search for his privately reprinted works in prose, and the solitary edition of his plays.