Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/114

 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