The “Jests to make you merry,” which in Dr. Grosart’s edition are placed after “The Gull’s Horn-book,” though dated two years earlier, will hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time as “The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner,” will give him pain to read of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how long—­at the lowest computation—­its author had endured the loathsome and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic intensity and persistency in detail.  Well may Dr. Grosart say that “it shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a spirit as was Dekker’s”; but I think as well as hope that there is no sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable effect.  It may be “possible,” but it is barely possible, that some “seven years’ continuous imprisonment” is the explanation of an ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this.  But in this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as powerful, as any in the immortal pages of Pickwick and Little Dorrit which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison discipline and tradition: 

The thing that complained was a man:—­“Thy days have gone over thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of a madman.—­Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too much honor!  Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half to be damned!  For what else is a prison but the very next door to hell?  It is a man’s grave, wherein he walks alive:  it is a sea wherein he is always shipwrackt:  it is a lodging built out of the world:  it is a wilderness where all that wander up and down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured.”

In Dekker’s next pamphlet, his “Dream,” there are perhaps half a dozen tolerably smooth and vigorous couplets immersed among many more vacuous and vehement in the intensity of their impotence than any reader and admirer of his more happily inspired verse could be expected to believe without evidence adduced.  Of imagination, faith, or fancy, the ugly futility of this infernal vision has not—­unless I have sought more than once for it in vain—­a single saving trace or compensating shadow.

Two years after he had tried his hand at an imitation of Nash, Dekker issued the first of the pamphlets in which he attempted to take up the succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque writer, or purveyor of guide-books through the realms of rascaldom.  “The Bellman of London,” or Rogue’s Horn-book, begins with a very graceful and fanciful description of the quiet beauty and seclusion of a country retreat