and religious declamation
than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must
again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat
ferocious humor, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal
novelist's Italian models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" is the
title of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came
to it for practical counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very
title-page calls their attention to the fact that, "if they look back,
they may behold many fearful judgments of God, sundry ways pronounced
upon this city, and on several persons, both flying from it and staying
in it." What the medical gentleman to whom this tract was dedicated may
have thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only
conjecture. But even in this little pamphlet there are anecdotes and
details which would repay the notice of a social historian as curious in
his research and as studious in his condescension as Macaulay.

A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet of Dekker's rank in Dekker's
age would have some interest for the reader of a later generation even
if it had not the literary charm which distinguishes the little volume
of devotions now reprinted from a single and an imperfect copy. We
cannot be too grateful for the good-fortune and the generous care to
which we are indebted for this revelation of a work of genius so curious
and so delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or agnostics, the
hardest and the driest of philosophers, might be moved and fascinated by
the exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even in those almost
incomparable collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets
of Milton shall we find sentences or passages more perfect in their
union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are
several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their
respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or
incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic
movement of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are perplexed to
understand how so exquisite an ear as was Dekker's at its best can have
been tolerant of such discord or insensible to such collapse as so often
disappoints or shocks us in the hastier and cruder passages of his
faltering and fluctuating verse. The prayer for a soldier going to
battle and his thanksgiving after victory are as noble in the dignity of