The Terrors of the Night, a discourse of apparitions, for once, among these oddly-named pieces, tells a plain story. Its successor, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, Nash's longest book, is one of those rather enigmatical expressions of repentance for loose life which were so common at the time, and which, according to the charity of the reader, may be attributed to real feeling, to a temporary access of Katzen-jammer, or to downright hypocrisy, bent only on manufacturing profitable "copy," and varying its style to catch different tastes. The most unfavourable hypothesis is probably unjust, and a certain tone of sincerity also runs through the next book, The Unfortunate Traveller, in which Nash, like many others, inveighs against the practice of sending young Englishmen to be corrupted abroad. It is noteworthy that this (the place of which in the history of the novel has been rather exaggerated) is the oldest authority for the romance of Surrey and Geraldine; but it is uncertain whether this was pure invention on Nash's part or not. Nash's Lenten Stuff is very interesting, being a panegyric on Great Yarmouth and its famous staple commodity (though Nash was actually born at Lowestoft).

In Nash's work we find a style both of treatment and language entirely different from anything of Greene's or Lodge's. He has no euphuism, his forte being either extravagant burlesque (in which the influence of Rabelais is pretty directly perceptible, while he himself acknowledges indebtedness to some other sources, such as Bullen or Bullein, a dialogue writer of the preceding generation), or else personal attack, boisterous and unscrupulous, but often most vigorous and effective. Diffuseness and want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when he shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of Have with you to Saffron Walden—the best example of its own kind to be found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of the eighteenth.

Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake, Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he was far Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creative grasp of character, he was entirely destitute of Nash's incisive and direct faculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among the prose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet (according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is not prose at all, but verse—yet not the verse of which Dekker had real mastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem, entitled Canaan's Calamity (1598). The next, The Wonderful Year, is the account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired, Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. The Bachelor's Banquet is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenth century satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle, the Quinze Joyes de Mariage, the resemblance being kept down to the recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of the original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings in telling circumstances appropriate to 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 letters was a Spenser and every man of affairs a Sidney or even a Raleigh. Extracts from The Seven Deadly Sins and The Gull's Hornbook may be given:—

"O Candle-light! and art thou one of the cursed crew? hast thou been set at the table of Princes and Noblemen? have all sorts of people done reverence unto thee, and stood bare so soon as ever they have seen thee? have thieves, traitors, and murderers been afraid to come in thy presence, because they knew thee just, and that thou wouldest discover them? And art thou now a harbourer of all kinds of vices? nay, dost thou play the capital Vice thyself? Hast thou had so many learned Lectures read before thee, and is the light of thy understanding now clean put out, and have so many profound scholars profited by thee? hast thou done such good to Universities, been such a guide to the lame, and seen the doing of so many good works, yet dost thou now look dimly, and with a dull eye, upon all goodness? What comfort have sick men taken (in weary and irksome nights) but only in thee? thou hast been their physician and apothecary, and when the relish of nothing could please them, the very shadow of thee hath been to them a restorative consolation. The nurse hath stilled her wayward infant, shewing it but to thee: What gladness hast thou put into mariners' bosoms when thou hast met them on the sea! What joy into the faint and benighted traveller when he has met thee on the land! How many poor handicraftsmen by thee have earned the best part of their living! And art thou now become a companion for drunkards, for leachers, and for prodigals? Art thou turned reprobate? thou wilt burn for it in hell. And so odious is this thy apostasy, and hiding thyself from the light of the truth, that at thy death and going out of the world, even they that love thee best will tread thee under their feet: yea, I that have thus played the herald, and proclaimed thy good parts, will now play the crier and call thee into open court, to arraign thee for thy misdemeanours."

"For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be at quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his nap) be hurtful?

"Besides, by the opinion of all philosophers and physicians, it is not good to trust the air with our bodies till the sun with his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the morning, and refined that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumatic night throws abroad of purpose to put out the eye of the element: which work questionless cannot be perfectly finished till the sun's car-horses stand prancing on the very top of highest noon: so that then (and not till then) is the most healthful hour to be stirring. Do you require examples to persuade you? At what time do Lords and Ladies use to rise but then? Your simpering merchants' wives are the fairest lyers in the world: and is not eleven o'clock their common hour? they find (no doubt) unspeakable sweetness in such lying, else they would not day by day put it so in practice. In a word, mid-day slumbers are golden; they make the body fat, the skin fair, the flesh plump, delicate and tender; they set a russet colour on the cheeks of young women, and make lusty courage to rise up in men; they make us thrifty, both in sparing victuals (for breakfasts thereby are saved from the hell-mouth of the belly) and in preserving apparel; for while we warm us in our beds our clothes are not worn.

"The casements of thine eyes being then at this commendable time of the day newly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm: for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue."

The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more the verse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies of Hereford and some others, must be passed over with very brief notice. Dr. Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast mass of matter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot be honestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life and perpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was an Essex gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), and apparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits of Elizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, if not his composition, cover a full half century, though he was nel mezzo del cammin at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some years before the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not die before the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charming lullaby of The Arbour of Amorous Devices he would stand (if only as a kind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart's attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida and Corydon" idyll, which may be found in England's Helicon or in Mr. Ward's Poets. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of two lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very different theme—

"O'er enamelled meads they went,
Quiet she, he passion-rent,"