his own day deserves every
acknowledgment. _Dekker's Dreame_ is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; and
then at a date somewhat later than that of our present period, but
connected with it by the fact of authorship, begins a very interesting
series of pieces, more vivid if somewhat less well written than Greene's,
and connected with his "conny-catching" course. _The Bellman of London_,
_Lanthorn and Candlelight_, _A Strange Horse-Race_, _The Seven Deadly Sins
of London_, _News from Hell_, _The Double P.P._, and _The Gull's Hornbook_,
are all pamphlets of this class; the chief interest resting in _News from
Hell_ (which, according to the author's scheme, connects itself with Nash's
_Pierce Penniless_, and is the devil's answer thereto) and _The Gull's
Hornbook_ (1609). This last, the best known of Dekker's work, is an
Englishing of the no less famous _Grobianus_ of Frederick Dedekind, and the
same skill of adaptation which was noticed in _The Bachelor's Banquet_ is
observable here. The spirit of these works seems to have been so popular
that Dekker kept it up in _The Dead Term_ [long vacation], _Work for
Armourers_ (which, however, is less particular and connects itself with
Nash's sententious work), _The Raven's Almanack_, and _A Rod for Runaways_
(1625). _The Four Birds of Noah's Ark_, which Dr. Grosart prints last, is
of a totally different character, being purely a book of piety. It is thus
inferior in interest to the series dealing with the low life of London,
which contains most curious studies of the ancient order of ragamuffins (as
a modern satirist has pleasantly called them), and bears altogether marks
of greater sincerity than the parallel studies of other writers. For about
Dekker, hack and penny-a-liner as he undoubtedly was, there was a
simplicity, a truth to nature, and at the same time a faculty of dramatic
presentation in which Greene, Lodge, and Nash were wholly wanting; and his
prose pamphlets smack of these good gifts in their measure as much as _The
Honest Whore_. Indeed, on the whole, he seems to be the most trustworthy
of these chroniclers of the English picaroons; and one feels disposed to
believe that if the things which he tells did not actually happen,
something very like them was probably happening every day in London during
the time of "Eliza and our James." For the time of Eliza and our James was
by no means a wholly heroic period, and it only loses, not gains, by the
fiction that every man of le