Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out as distinct from the rest by right of such astonishing superiority in merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for separate and final consideration.  But it would require more time and labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance.  “The Wonderful Year” of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his quaintest and liveliest tracts:  in which the historical part has no quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and humor in the anecdotes appended “like a merry epilogue to a dull play, of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter’s nights that lie watching in the dark for us,” with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the Decameron, but at least of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.  In “The Seven Deadly Sins of London”—­one of the milder but less brilliant Latter-day Pamphlets of a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle—­there are touches of earnest eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism than in the preceding tract.  And yet there are good things to be gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence, for example, is worth recollection:  “He is not slothful that is only lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and licentious ease:—­no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good.”  And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect.  Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition of the poorest among us is assuredly not such that we can read without a sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence:  “Thou set’st up posts to whip them when they are alive:  set up an hospital to comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when they be well; and that is, when they be dead.”  The next of Dekker’s tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others:  the influence of a more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom Nash, is here not only manifest as that of a model, but has taken such possession of his disciple that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile copyist; not without a touch of his master’s more serious eloquence, but with less than little of his peculiar