If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus. Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but, without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it be none of your own, swear you made it. This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or of Sterne: Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of another man's, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: "'Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend." And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, _or else that you dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries with it_. The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the earlier animalcule. The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. Grosart's edition are placed after "The Gull's Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time as "The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to read of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how long--at the lowest computation--its author had endured the loathsome and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that "it shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as hope that there is no sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely possible, that some "seven years' continuous imprisonment" is the explanation of an ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as powerful, as any in the immortal pages of _Pickwick_ and _Little Dorrit_ which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison discipline and tradition: