These homely but hearty lines occur in a small and mainly metrical tract bearing a title so quaint that I am tempted to transcribe it at length:  “The Double PP.  A Papist in Arms.  Bearing Ten several Shields.  Encountered by the Protestant.  At Ten several Weapons.  A Jesuit Marching before them.  Cominus and Eminus.”  There are a few other vigorous and pointed verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but the greater part of it is merely curious and eccentric doggrel.

The next of Dekker’s tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively well-known “Gull’s Hornbook.”  This brilliant and vivid little satire is so rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography taken by the sunlight of an honest and kindly nature, that it stands second only to the author’s masterpiece in prose, “The Bachelor’s Banquet,” which has waited so much longer for even the limited recognition implied by a private reprint.  There are so many witty or sensible or humorous or grotesque excerpts to be selected from this pamphlet—­and not from the parts borrowed or copied from a foreign satire on the habits of slovenly Hollanders—­that I take the first which comes under my notice on reopening the book; a study which sets before us in fascinating relief the professional poeticule of a period in which as yet clubs, coteries, and newspapers were not—­or at the worst were nothing to speak of: 

If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus.  Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer itself to the Gentlemen:  they will presently desire it:  but, without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it be none of your own, swear you made it.

This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or of Sterne: 

Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of another man’s, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say:  “’Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend.”  And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, or else that you dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries with it.

The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these:  but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the earlier animalcule.