There can be few greater contrasts than between this furious ribaldry, as it too often is, and the mild mediocrity of Nicholas Breton. His claim to a place here (even if his merit be rated much lower than some have rated it) is, that he is the chief writer of the kind who is both in verse and prose a pamphleteer pure and simple. You cannot (at least I cannot) call Breton a poet, but he wrote immense quantities of verse, and in prose he pamphleted with such copiousness and persistence for nearly half a century, that it is clear there must have been money to be made by the practice. The last of our chief single authors is Thomas Dekker, a very much greater man than Breton, though not so great in prose as in verse. He was somewhat later even in his beginning than the other writers I have noticed; and though his prose has not the formal merit or charm of his exquisite songs and his wonderful romantic character in drama, it is very interesting in matter. He paraphrases (_The Bachelor's Banquet_, _The Gull's Hornbook_) with remarkable freedom and skill; he chronicles plague years; he takes a hint from Greene, and extends and varies that author's satirical exposition of London tricks in a long and extremely vivid series of pamphlets, such as _The Bellman of London_, _The Seven Deadly Sins of London_, _Lanthorn and Candle Light_, _News from Hell_, and half a dozen others. In these, though of course a certain allowance must be made for the pressman's exaggeration in dealing with such subjects, there is a most singular and interesting picture of the lower and looser classes in England, at least in the English capital, at the time. In this little book, after one or two changes of plan, I have finally decided on giving only entire pamphlets--a specimen of literary criticism from Lodge, of autobiographic romance from Greene, of politico-religious controversy from the Martin Marprelate series, of mingled self-panegyric and lampoon from Harvey, of burlesque from Nash, of paraphrase of foreign matter adapted to English conditions from Dekker, and of what may be called hack-work for the press from Breton. The annotation is deliberately limited to the removal of some of the most obvious stumbling-blocks to current reading. A full commentary on _The Gull's Hornbook_ alone would fill another volume, and the object in these books is to give text not comment. I.--THOMAS LODGE