pen
daylight of the street below our window. With all his admiration for
Marlowe's performance Nash had told, in very ludicrous fashion indeed,
the story of Hero and Leander, associating in a manner unwarranted by
ancient historians their fate with the vicissitudes of Great Yarmouth
and the red herring. In the same way Dekker makes choice of that
exquisite tale of Orpheus which reads so pathetically in the prose of
King Alfred, and he tells it thus:

"Assist mee therefore, thou genius of that ventrous but zealous musicion
of Thrace, Euridice's husband, who being besotted on his wife, of whiche
sin none but ... should be guiltie, went alive with his fiddle at's
backe, to see if he could bail her out of that adamantine prison. The
fees he was to pay for her were jigs and countrey-daunces: he paid them;
the forfeits if he put on yellow stockings and lookt back upon her, was
her everlasting lying there, without bayle or mayne-prize. The loving
coxcomb could not choose but look backe, and so lost her: perhaps hee
did it because he would be rid of her. The morall of which is, that if a
man leave his owne busines and have an eie to his wives dooings, sheele
give him the slip though she runne to the divell for her labour."[300]

Dekker did not write novels properly so called, but his prose works
abound with scenes that seem detached from novels, and that were so well
fitted for that kind of writing that we find them again in the works of
professional novelists of his or of a later time. His "Wonderfull yeare
1603," from which Defoe seems to have taken several hints, abounds in
scenes of this sort.[301] It is a book "wherein is shewed the picture
of London lying sicke of the plague. At the ende of all, like a mery
epilogue to a dull play sundry tales are cut out in sundry fashions of
purpose to shorten the lives of long winters nights that lye watching in
the darke for us." Some of these tales are extremely well told, for
Dekker is more successful in describing the humours than the terrors of
the plague. In one of them we find another copy of the fat hostler so
well described already by Nash and, as it seems, inspired by a
reminiscence of the picture in "Jack Wilton." Dekker's man is not
thinner, cleaner, nor braver than Nash's victualler. He is a country
innkeeper: "a goodly fat burger he was, with a belly arching out like a
beere-barrell, which made his legges, that were thicke and short like
two piles driven under London bri