their devotion as the prayers for a woman in travail and "for them that
visit the sick" are delicate and earnest in their tenderness. The prayer
for a prisoner is too beautiful to stand in need of the additional and
pathetic interest which it derives from the fact of its author's
repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet
such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions
is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the
bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen
Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text--it is hardly
possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast between its
hideous jargon and the refined purity of his own melodious English. The
prayer for the Council is singularly noble in the eloquence of its
patriotism: the prayer for the country is simply magnificent in the
austere music of its fervent cadences: the prayer in time of civil war
is so passionate in its cry for deliverance from all danger of the
miseries then or lately afflicting the continent that it might well have
been put up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great war which
Dekker might have lived to see break out in his own country. The prayer
for the evening is so beautiful as to double our regret for the
deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of all but the opening of
the morning prayer.[1] The feathers fallen from the wings of these "Four
Birds of Noah's Ark" would be worth more to the literary ornithologist
than whole flocks of such "tame villatic fowl" as people the ordinary
coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature.

[Footnote 1: A noticeable instance of the use of a common word in the
original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be cited from the
unfortunately truncated and scanty fragment of a prayer for the court:
"Oh Lord, be thou a husband" (house-band) "to that great household of
our King."]

One work only of Dekker's too often overtasked and heavy-laden genius
remains to be noticed: it is one which gives him a high place forever
among English humorists. No sooner has the reader run his eye over the
first three or four pages than he feels himself, with delight and
astonishment, in the company of a writer whose genius is akin at once to
Goldsmith's and to Thackeray's; a writer whose style is so pure and
vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we seem to have already
entered upon the best age of E