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 English prose.  Had Mr. Matthew Arnold, instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise, or had he condescended to glance over Daniel’s compact and admirable “Defence of Rhyme,” he would have found in writers of the despised Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our literature by writers of the age of Dryden.  The dialogue of the very first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at the opening of Dekker’s pamphlet is worthy of Sterne:  the visit of the gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Moliere, and the humors of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of Dickens.  The lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in consequence of her obsequious husband’s alleged neglect, “no more like the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster”; the description of the poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and trampled