But on the other hand we are told that his "Satiromastix" is not too severely called "a preposterous medley": that his "besetting vice" is "reckless and sluttish incoherence"; that one play can be best explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor's prison; that "there are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens and of sluts." Dekker wrote several pamphlets, which, in a sort, resemble some minor work of Daniel de Foe. Middleton. Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was "a base fellow," he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is unknown (1570?), as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; by 1602 he was working at plays in which five or six other men collaborated. Probably they settled on a plot, or rather on two plots, upper and under, and each author wrote an act: a little ready money came in, but the dramas must have been "in the veniable part of things lost". Middleton frequently worked with Dekker, also with Rowley. They are usually thought to have mainly contributed the noisy and incoherent underplots, but Dekker's admirers credit _him_ with the _dénouement_ of "The Old Law" (Middleton, Massinger, Dekker). Mr. Bullen finds this passage the drollest of things droll. There can be no doubt that it must have evoked hearty laughter on the stage. Easily are Hoard and Lucre gulled in "A Trick to Catch the Old One," namely the uncle of the young profligate Witgood. Granting that these ancient chuffs were incredibly credulous, the play is a bustling comedy, with abundance of tricks and turns. The Mayor of Queenburgh in the play so styled was contemporary with Hengist and Horsa; is full of very serious matter, merrily set down. We must not approach in a spirit of historical pedantry a drama in which the Earls of Devonshire and Staffordshire, the sons of Constantine (namely Aurelius Ambrosius, Constantius, and Uther Pendragon), with Vortiger and Horsus, Hengist, the tanner Mayor of Quinborough, Aminada, and a number of button-makers and professional murderers, also two monks, play their parts. The incoherencies, the button-makers, the chaste Constantius, an unwilling monarch, his murder by the minions of Vortiger, their murder (in Macbeth's manner) by Vortiger, are the drollest of unconscious drolleries. This monstrous medley of dull disconnected humours, unspeakable villainies, and speeches in excellent blank verse, with the sufferings of the angelic Castiza, contains, as usual, a pearl of wronged and innocent womanhood. Middleton is thought by some to walk more closely in Shakespeare's footsteps than even Webster, and his acknowledged masterpiece is "The Changeling," so called from the underplot (by Rowley), in which two sane men smuggle themselves as maniac and idiot into a private lunatic asylum. The cheerful interludes of lunacy set off the tragedy.