Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/119

 thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only conjecture. But even in this little pamphlet there are anecdotes and details which would repay the notice of a social historian as curious in his research and as studious in his condescension as Macaulay.

A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet of Dekker's rank in Dekker's age would have some interest for the reader of a later generation even if it had not the literary charm which distinguishes the little volume of devotions now reprinted from a single and an imperfect copy. We cannot be too grateful for the good-fortune and the generous care to which we are indebted for this revelation of a work of genius so curious and so delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or agnostics, the hardest and the driest of philosophers, might be moved and fascinated by the exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even in those almost incomparable collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets of Milton shall we find sentences or passages more perfect in their union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic movement of the style is so nearly