rivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the
surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to
a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas
Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far
below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous
outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive
evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that
a poet must be found guilty of its authorship. And we know that a
pamphlet or novelette of Deloney's called "Thomas of Reading; or, the
Six Worthy Yeomen of the West," was ascribed to Dekker until the actual
author was discovered.[1] Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first
collected edition of Dekker's pamphlets, says in the introduction to
the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should have doubted the
responsibility of Dekker for a poem with which it may perhaps be unfair
to saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic highway as the jaded
Pegasus of Deloney, had he not been detected as the author of another
religious book. But this latter is a book of the finest and rarest
quality--one of its author's most unquestionable claims to immortality
in the affection and admiration of all but the most unworthy readers;
and "Canaan's Calamity" is one of the worst metrical samples extant of
religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to
attest anything, the fact of Dekker's having written one of the most
beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to
disprove than to prove his authorship of one of the feeblest and most
pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse.

[Footnote 1: It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims
on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative,
worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive
simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of
a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of
unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and
abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would
now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.]

Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners
of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out
as distinct from the rest by right of such a