Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/108

 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 humour 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 'Latterday 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 vigour 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