stonishing superiority in
merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for
separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and
labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions
or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious
pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful Year"
of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation
of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his
quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no
quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and
humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry epilogue to a dull play,
of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter's nights that lie
watching in the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry
not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the _Decameron_, but at
least of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. In "The Seven Deadly Sins of
London"--one of the milder but less brilliant _Latter-day Pamphlets_ of
a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle--there are touches of earnest
eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social
history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism
than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be
gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence,
for example, is worth recollection: "He is not slothful that is only
lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and
licentious ease:--no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good."
And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his
remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of
his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the
blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the
heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect.
Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition
of the poorest among us is assuredly not such that we can read without a
sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence: "Thou
set'st up posts to whip them when they are alive: set up an hospital to
comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when
they be well; _and that is, when they be dead_." The next of Dekker's
tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others: