He had many traits in common with Nash: the same excellent faculty of observation, the same gaiety and _entrain_, with powers of his own to associate it with the most exquisite tenderness and pathos; the same love for literature and for the poets, for Chaucer, for Spenser, whose arrival in the Elysian fields he describes in a way to tempt the pencil of a painter: "Grave Spenser was no sooner entred into this chappell of Apollo, but these elder fathers of the divine furie gave him a lawrer and sung his welcome; Chaucer call'd him his sonne and plac'd him at his right hand. All of them, at a signe given by the whole quire of the Muses that brought him thither, closing up their lippes in silence, and turning all their eares for attention to heare him sing out the rest of Fayrie Queenes prayses."[295] But a marked difference between Dekker and Nash resulted from the fact that Dekker had not only a love of poetry, but a poetical faculty of a high order. He went far beyond the picturesqueness of Nash's word-painting, and reached in his prose as well as in his verse true lyrical emotion and pathos; he had, said Lamb, "poetry enough for anything;"[296] and while Nash's gaiety, true and hearty as it is, takes often and naturally a bitter satirical turn, Dekker's gaiety though sometimes bitter, more usually takes a pretty, graceful, and fanciful turn. "Come, strew apace, strew, strew: in good troth tis a pitty that these flowers must be trodden under feete as they are like to be anon ... [Illustration: "DEKKER HIS DREAM."] "Pitty? come foole, fling them about lustily; flowers never dye a sweeter death than when they are smoother'd to death in a Lovers bosome, or else pave the high wayes over which these pretty, simpering, setting things call'd brides must trippe."[297] Intimate literary ties, however, existed between Nash and Dekker; many passages in the one remind us of similar things in the other, the result sometimes of actual imitation, sometimes of involuntary reminiscences. Dekker was well aware of the family likeness between the two, so much so that we see him once calling Nash's ghost to his assistance, as one from whom he might most naturally gain help: "And thou into whose soule ... the raptures of that fierie and inconfinable Italian spirit were bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow'd to thy friends, and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat dunce[298] ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with me awhile."[299]