in which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply.  The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious:  but the demand for such literature must have been singularly persistent to evoke a sequel to this book next year, “Lantern and Candle-light; or, the Bellman’s Second Night-walk,” in which Dekker continues his account of vagrant and villanous society, its lawless laws and its unmannerly manners; and gives the reader some vivid studies, interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded with indignant declamation, of the tricks of horse-dealers and the shifts of gypsies—­or “moon-men” as he calls them; a race which he regarded with a mixture of angry perplexity and passionate disgust.  “A Strange Horse-race” between various virtues and vices gives occasion for the display of some allegoric ingenuity and much indefatigable but fatiguing pertinacity in the exposure of the more exalted swindlers of the age—­the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of the Merdles described by Dickens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker.  Here too there are glimpses of inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate whose “last will and testament” is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet.

In “The Dead Term” such a reader will find himself more or less relieved by the return of his author to a more terrene and realistic sort of allegory.  This recriminatory dialogue between the London and the Westminster of 1608 is now and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity of rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath of genuine eloquence, and redeemed by touches of historic or social interest.  The title and motto of the next year’s pamphlet—­“Work for Armourers; or, the Peace is Broken.—­God help the Poor, the rich can shift”—­were presumably designed to attract the casual reader, by what would now be called a sensational device, to consideration of the social question between rich and poor—­or, as he puts it, between the rival queens, Poverty and Money.  The forces on either side are drawn out and arrayed with pathetic ingenuity, and the result is indicated with a quaint and grim effect of humorous if indignant resignation.  “The Raven’s Almanack” of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation