and "Canaan's Calamity" is one of the worst metrical samples extant of religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to attest anything, the fact of Dekker's having written one of the most beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to disprove than to prove his authorship of one of the feeblest and most pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse. [Footnote 1: It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.] Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out as distinct from the rest by right of such astonishing superiority in merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful Year" of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry epilogue to a dull play, of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter's nights that lie watching in the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the _Decameron_, but at least of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. In "The Seven Deadly Sins of London"--one of the milder but less brilliant _Latter-day Pamphlets_ of a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle--there are touches of earnest eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence, for example, is worth recollection: "He is not slothful that is only lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and licentious ease:--no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good." And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the