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 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