Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/116

 the succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque writer, or purveyor of guide-books through the realms of rascaldom. 'The Bellman of London,' or Rogue's Horn-book, begins with a very graceful and fanciful description of the quiet beauty and seclusion of a country retreat in which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villainy as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious: but the demand for such literature must have been singularly persistent to evoke a sequel to this book next year, 'Lantern and Candle-light; or, the Bellman's Second Night-walk,' in which Dekker continues his account of vagrant and villainous society, its lawless laws and its unmannerly manners; and gives the reader some vivid studies, interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded with indignant declamation, of the tricks of horse-dealers and the shifts of gypsies—or 'moon-men' as he calls them; a race which he regarded with a mixture of angry