Samuel Rowlands was one of the most consistent and imaginative of the early Stuart pamphleteers. Sarah Dickson, in "The 'Humours' of Samuel Rowlands" (1950), one of the few articles devoted to him, considered him "the most undeservedly neglected of Jacobean writers." This statement is still true more than forty years later, even though this author of twenty-six known works between 1598 and 1628, some republished in multiple editions up to the Restoration, played a significant role in the Jacobean literary world as satirist and devotional writer.

Edmund Gosse, in his introduction to his edition of Rowlands's works, gave as much information on his life as is known 110 years later: nothing is known, except what can be inferred from his works themselves. Rowlands seems to have lived all his life in London, to have had no university background, and to have had intimate contact with lower-and middle-class London life. He seems to...