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.” It may be merely my fancy, but I seem to hear a melancholy echo in it, as of footfalls on frozen earth. Or take this for a pretty fancy:-- “The moon hath through her bow scarce drawn to the head, Like to twelve silver arrows, all the months Since--” when do you suppose? I give you three guesses, as the children say. Since 1600! Poor Fancy shudders at this opening of Haydn’s “Dictionary of Dates” and thinks her silver arrows a little out of place, like a belated masquerader going home under the broad grin of day. But the verses themselves seem plucked from “Midsummer-Night’s Dream.”