If Lamb had known and read the first work published by Rowley, it is impossible to imagine that it would not have been honored by the tribute of some passing and priceless word.  Why it has never been reissued (except in a private reprint for the Percy Society) among the many less deserving and less interesting revivals from the apparently and not really ephemeral literature of its day would be to me an insoluble problem, if I were so ignorant as never to have realized the too obvious fact that chance, pure and simple chance, guides or misguides the intelligence, and suggests or fails to suggest, the duty of scholars and of students who have given time and thought to such far from unimportant or insignificant matters.  “A Search for Money; or, a Quest for the Wandering Knight Monsieur L’Argent,” is not comparable with the best pamphlets of Nash or of Dekker:  a competent reader of those admirable improvisations will at the first opening feel inclined to regard it as a feeble and servile imitation of their quaint and obsolescent manner; but he will soon find an original and a vigorous vein of native humor in their comrade or their disciple.  The seekers after the wandering knight, baffled in their search on shore, are compelled to recognize the sad fact that “the sea is lunatic, and mad folks keep no money, he would sink if he were there.”  The description of an usurer is memorable by its reference to the first great poet of England, among whose followers Rowley is far from the least worthy of honor.  “His visage (or vizard), like the artificial Jew of Malta’s nose,” brings before the reader in vivid realism the likeness of Alleyn or Burbage as he represented in grotesque and tragic disguise the magnificent figure of Marlowe’s creative invention or discovery by dint of genius. (I do not remember the curious verb “to rand” except in this little book:  “he randed out these sentences”:  I presume it to be the first form of “rant.”) The account of St. Paul’s in 1609 is very curious and scandalous:  “the very Temple itself (in bare humility) stood without his cap, and so had stood many years, many good folks had spoke for him because he could not speak for himself, and somewhat had been gathered in his behalf, but not half enough to supply his necessity.”

When we pass from “the Temple” to Westminster Hall we come upon a sample of humor which would be famous if it were the gift of a less ungratefully forgotten hand.

“Here were two brothers at buffets with angels in their fists about the thatch that blew off his house into the other’s garden and so spoiled a Hartichoke.”

It should not have been left to a later hand—­it should surely have been the privilege of Lamb’s or Hazlitt’s, and perhaps rather Hazlitt’s than even Lamb’s—­to unearth and to transcribe the quaint and spirited description of Thames watermen “howling, hollowing, and calling for passengers, as if all the hags in hell had been imprisoned, and begging at the gate, fiends and furies that (God be thanked) could vex the soul but not torment it, yet indeed their most power was over the body, for here an audacious mouthing-randing-impudent-scullery-wastecoat-and-bodied rascal would have hail’d a penny from us for his scullerships.”